The Resignation of Inspector Javert
by Wraithwitch
Summary: When an act of kindness destroyed him, might another save him? Or can the Inspector's path lead only to the river?   Revised and hopefully improved
1. Chapter 1

**The Resignation of Inspector Javert.**

"_Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the sense of duty, are things which may become hideous when wrongly directed; but which, even when hideous, remain grand: their majesty, the majesty peculiar to the human conscience, clings to them in the midst of horror; they are virtues which have one vice, - error. The honest, pitiless joy of a fanatic in the full flood of his atrocity preserves a certain lugubriously venerable radiance. Without himself suspecting the fact, Javert in his formidable happiness was to be pitied, as is every ignorant man who triumphs. Nothing could be so poignant and so terrible as this face, wherein was displayed all that may be designated as the evil of the good_."

Victor Hugo.

* * *

In this world, it shall always be there are men of learning and of a certain type of mind who will take it upon themselves to categorize, refine and define the cosmos. Were it up to them, no child would ever ask, _'Maman, what is that thing just between sleep and waking when you are half in a dream and half in the world and for a second might fly if you wished, for you know it is nothing but a dream and you have nothing to lose?'_ without the mother answering, _'It is called somnolent gnosis, ma petite,'_ or some such. There would be no mystery on earth unexplained, no happenstance of existence undefined.

Such a man as this undoubtedly coined the phrase 'cognitive dissonance'. This describes the unpleasant feeling generated when one is in some manner forced to hold conflicting ideas simultaneously and is unable to rid oneself of either of them. It is a state of civil unrest within the twin spheres of the brain, a philosophical battle with no victor. It is a supremely sorry state of affairs, and one that was currently plaguing an Inspector, First Class, of the Paris Constabulary. Where as an artist or student - one more used to argument within himself and seeing the world in subtly shifting tones - might shrug such an affliction off, to a man of certainty and iron-clad conviction, such dissonance could prove as damaging as a knife thrust between the ribs.

As he walked along, the Inspector did have the look of a man quietly bleeding to death from a soul-wound too grievous to stem.

Since his time at the barricades he had discarded his slouch cap and jacket and reclaimed his hat and greatcoat from the station-house, thus returning his appearance to that which was more usual. A close observer would have noticed that his boots were scuffed and mud-caked, his hair (sable-turning-pewter) was escaping from its habitually tight queue, and his greatcoat was slovenly buttoned; all of which disarray was usually anathema to the Inspector.

It was past one of the clock and he was walking back from the station-house on the corner of the Place du Chatelet, to the Pont au Change which he had abandoned to his errand not twenty minute previously. He did not look at his surroundings, he walked as one distracted yet intimately acquainted with the city and so able to move about without giving the terrain his full attention.

At last he slowed at the zenith of the bridge, as if that gradient, although slight, was more than his feet could bear. He looked skyward at the velvet of the heavens and the light of the stars that shone there. It is a sight that has moved poets and lovers to wax lyrical, but produced no such affect upon the Inspector. The steel grey of his eyes widened in an attitude of horror and his mouth curled downwards in a show of self-loathing. If one were given to fancy, one would hazard that for him the sky had been void of stars, and he had taken their absence as a personal reproof.

As his chin lowered, his line of sight now took in the upper echelons of the Palais de Justice, and in its shadow the building of the Préfecture. Here his gaze stopped, and he stared at them with the grim hopelessness of a man trying to outstare the sun. At length he blinked, and nodded his head in defeat. Weary now but still straight-backed, he turned, facing out towards the river and the indistinct shape of the Pont Neuf which spanned the darkness a little way downstream. He did not rest his hands upon the stone, instead he reached into the pockets of his greatcoat and methodically excavated what he found there.

These pockets had, through many years habit, contained four things. The first was a day book with a stick of writing lead which he had given not half an hour past to the Sergeant at Chatelet with instructions that it be sent on to the Préfecture.

The second, a slim chased silver snuff box, lay in his palm now. He looked at it for some moments as it rested in his hand as if he had no clue to its function nor had seen it before. With deliberation – for he was beyond all things a very deliberate man – he set it on the parapet before him.

The third was a seal – a writ set within glass as such that a public servant of office might carry to identify him. This he placed beside the snuffbox. Time passed. He removed his hat, a battered article, old but well cared for, and placed it over those two objects as if to shield them.

The fourth item from the pockets of his greatcoat was a set of irons. He spared these not a single glance, but with the movements of one whose hands knew well their business he snapped the first fetter about his left wrist at his back and the second about his right, locking his hands behind him. Without pause and with great elegance of movement, the Inspector swung first one leg and then the other over the stone balustrade so that he perched, like his effects, upon the parapet. The heels of his boots eased down and found purchase upon the outer lip of the masonry that arced across the rushing waters of the Seine. He stood now upon the edge of oblivion.

This ghost, tall and grim in his demeanor had not been unobserved. A figure hurried along the Quai de Gesvres towards him, unnoticed by the specter at the edge of the Pont au Change. There was a moment of perfect stillness: the dark figure upon the parapet, the interloper frozen as he viewed the scene and struggled to comprehend its meaning...

With the terrible grace of an angel who knows it is damned, the ghost leant forward. He seemed to hang for a heartbeat, suspended, held up perhaps by the light of the stars above –

"_No!"_

- before gravity took hold and he toppled into the waiting darkness of the Seine.

There was a curse - _c'est le __foutu bordel_ - not just spat but bellowed, and the interloper, the unintended audience to this awful act, began to run.

Should a strong man watch a loved one take such a leap towards death, we would find it inconceivable that they did not immediately jump after them with the express though of rescue. Should a member of the public, an Everyman, witness such a fate befall a stranger, we would understand if they did not follow and applaud their heroism should they do otherwise. How then, if the man poised on the brink of destruction and the one observing him were enemies – adversaries who had fought each other through the years? We would expect the one to die, the other to watch with relief, if not satisfaction.

It was all the more surprising then, all the more unthinkingly selfless, when we learn that the man who had dropped into the Seine was Javert, and the man who ran, vaulted, and plunged into that uncertain abyss after him was Jean Valjean.

* * *

Javert knew a moment of weightlessness; the night air that rushed past snatching the loosened slip of silk that had bound his hair and tugging too at the tails of his coat, forming him into the parody of a crow in flight... And then the Seine claimed him.

He had given no thought to what it might be like. One might imagine that on a summer's night it would be welcoming, embracing one like a lover, the water murmuring a sibilance of sweetness as it dragged one towards death. It was not so.

The water enveloped Javert like a liquid brick wall, colaphizing the air from his lungs and clasping him with cold and brutal arms. In shock he inhaled, and the Seine invaded his body just as brutally. Ever contrary, what air remained in his chest and the currents conspired together to lift him once more, allowing his head to break the surface, for a choked breath to be taken - once, twice - before the weight of his coat, the dark eddies and his locked hands pulled him under and ever downwards.

* * *

He had seen the Inspector poised on the bridge, but, just as a man with a sword at his throat cannot truly believe that same steel will slice inwards and end his life in a bright gout of red, likewise he was incapable of imagining that the Inspector would make good on the action. Javert was an implacable creature of rigid values; he could not be bargained with, reasoned with or stopped in the pursuit of one he considered prey. He was a starving wolf, the unlawful his catch and their incarceration his meat and vittles. He was incapable of any act seeped in such selfish desperation.

And then as the Inspector vanished downwards from the lip of the parapet, Valjean was forced to reevaluate his assessment of Javert's character and to do so at speed, for further amazement wasted time.

In this history thus presented, we have witnessed many feats of strength as practiced by Jean Valjean. The moving of a boulder many times his weight, the scaling of walls, the lifting of a cart, to name but a few. But just because such practices have happened with a regularity to render them almost commonplace, does not mean that we should regard them as any less remarkable. That is to say, Valjean's rush to the side of the Pont au Change and his subsequent vault over the balustrade into the depths of the Seine was not an act to be belittled. The fact that he had the strength within his limbs and heart to do so after a day at the barricades and a night in the sewers does not automatically render the act an easy one. Indeed, as the cold of the water closed over his head, Valjean spared a thought to wonder if he had not just signed his own deathwrit...

It is a lazy conceit of writers, (and an unpardonable lapse for historians) to attribute the unlikely outcome of a situation to God. Battles may be lost all for the want of a horse-shoe and nail, but that is not ostensibly the hand of God - at least, the will of the divine does not imprint more heavily upon that matter than upon any other. From the point of view of Generals who know nothing of a single thrown shoe it might seem as such, but it is a fallacy.

In such a manner, it vexes me I can offer you no satisfactory and natural reason for why Valjean should have been capable of finding and clasping hold of Javert in the crush and swell of the unforgiving water. In truth he should not; the odds of such a happenstance are beyond my merge means to calculate. No doubt timing is all: at _this_ moment Valjean knifed into the river, at _that_ moment Javert surfaced for an instant. The light fell _here,_ eyes locked on their prey _there._ _This_ current pulled one of them _thus_, whilst _that_ eddy turned them _thither_. And in such a manner did Valjean catch his quarry and, with Herculean effort, convey both of them to the stone steps of the little jetty at the side of the Quai de la Mégisserie, some lengths down-steam.

At last, with as much expenditure of strength as it had taken to drag Marius through the sewers and with near as a profound feeling of relief, Valjean reached the steps and flung the Inspector upon them, dragging himself onto the stone after and with a final effort, depositing them both on the narrow stone jetty. There he lay for a time, nequient of any further movement, so far beyond the natural limits of endurance that breathing was an exhausting effort.

That acknowledgement seemed to stir some disquieting thought within him for with a scarcely audible groan Valjean levered himself upright, grabbed the Inspector by the shoulders and struck him several times upon the back with the flat of his palm. It produced no effect whatsoever. The man cursed the corpse in his care roundly – _Putain! __Ne fait pas le con! Ah, ce me fait chier..._ – and struck him again with a mounting violence that spoke of desperation.

Of a sudden the corpse twitched, convulsed as if caught on some invisible hook and vomited up copious amounts of river water. Valjean gave a ragged sigh, collapsing back against the wall of the quay and keeping a baleful eye on the sodden and sorry figure of the Inspector as he continued to cough the Seine from his defedated lungs.

"_Pardieu,"_ the older man swore with relief, "thought I'd lost you."

The Inspector made no comment about the absurdity of such a statement; it is in fact doubtful he heard it at all and if he did it certainly did not register. The Inspector's world was still very much aquatic in nature. His clothes were water-logged, his hair hung about his face in darkly sodden rat's-tails, his eyes were clouded with liquid and his nose, throat, and lungs wetly burnt with a surfeit of the stuff. Blindly, his hands clawing for purchase against the stone and the shackles that still bound them, Javert succeeded in bracing against the jetty, and, like some uncertain Lazarus, he pushed himself upright.

Surprise and a hint of unease mingled. "Javert?"

Like a drunk, a man in the grip of a siren song, blank eyed and weak legged Javert stumbled to his feet and staggered down the steps towards the river. Had he stepped straight off the side of the jetty things would have gone differently, but in a twist of felicity his beleaguered brain had fixed upon the pale stone of the steps and saw that they lead to the river's depths: and so that was the direction he chose. He had reached the water, the silt lapping against his boots once more when a fist connected with the side of his head. He ricocheted off the quayside wall and dropped, senseless, boneless, against the muddy stone.

"_Fils de salop!"_ Valjean uncurled his fist with an apologetic grimace, raised his eyes heavenward briefly and then addressed the unconscious man. _"Pardon,"_ he huffed, grasping him by the collar and dragging him unceremoniously up the steps to the haven of the jetty. "But one dousing was enough." A sigh and he knelt awkwardly beside his adversary, pulling at the heavy folds of his coat. "Let us hope," he complained to himself, "you are a creature of habit and your keys, as ever, are latched at your belt. Otherwise..." Blind searching with numb fingers was rewarded with the Inspector's keys. "Thank heaven for small mercies," Valjean acknowledged, rolling the other man awkwardly round so that he might unlock the cuffs that chained him.

* * *

Sense and sensation returned to him reluctantly. His body was leaden and cold and for a moment he felt triumph, for if ever a drowned corpse could acknowledge its existence it would surely feel like this. Something brackish rose at the back of his throat and he coughed, water dribbling from his mouth. An uneasy notion fought its way to the forefront of his mind: unless this was hell and the universe had a frankly putrid sense of humor, he should not feel this discomforted if he was dead.

Gritty eyelashes prized themselves apart with all the reluctance of a rusted gate and he blinked against the dark of the summer sky and the waterlogged shapes of light and shadow that swam before his wavering vision. One shape, paler and nearer than the rest resolved itself into the concerned and dripping face of Jean Valjean. Javert stared at him, feeling no surprise and only the barest flicker of disappointment. "Of course," he rasped. "Who else?" Sense and vision dimmed.

Moments, aeons, later it was called to heel as hands griped his shoulders, gave him a little shake. He struggled to sit, with the vague notion that this might grant him peace. The hands did not release their hold but moved instead to brace him steady.

"Can you walk?"

Javert gave the demon before him a tired and disappointed look of the sort that might be bestowed upon an imbecile child. The darkness from the river had never entirely released its hold, and he felt those Lethe-y waters rise again in his mind. The Inspector barely entertained the notion of fighting against the pull of oblivion. It had been a long day and an even longer night – exhaustion was a distant memory, unconsciousness a widening and welcome pit at his feet.

"Javert!"

There was darkness for a time – although what measure of time the fastidious Inspector could not swear to. The world returned to him in frozen instances, like bubbles risen from the depths of eternity.

He was being held – dragged, and supported – by someone. His right arm was locked across their broad shoulders; their left arm tightly circled his waist, lodged beneath his ribs, holding him up and propelling him along by brute strength as his boots dragged across the cobbles.

"I wish you'd lift your damn legs," his keeper complained, voice taut with exertion and worry.

Javert for his part made an inarticulate noise against the sodden wool of their coat. "Forgive me if I'm a little past my best," he replied. At least, those were the words he meant to say, but his lips were numb, his breath all but absent and his rebuke was mangled to nothing more but a second sound of semi-conscious distress.

Darkness came again.

* * *

Disjointed instances: streets which twisted and roiled beneath his feet, causing him to stumble those few times he was aware enough to attempt to walk. Pain in his side from where the hand clasped him like a vice, an ache in his opposite shoulder from his arm being used as an anchor-point. An ever present vitriol-burn in his chest. Light and shadow dancing before his uncomprehending eyes. The sound of carriage wheels on cobbles and the sensation of being rocked in a hammock filled with stones...

When next his eyes stayed open for longer than an instant, Javert was sat on the floor, propped against a wall in the atrium of a house. The house was dark. A single spark of light was called into existence: an unbearably bright pinpoint in the darkness which now floated towards him. He could feel his pupils cringe in complaint.

"_Pardieu,"_ muttered a voice behind the light. "You look awful."

"_Plus ça change,"_ Javert croaked blithely.

"Huh. I'm glad you're awake," the voice continued, sounding more put-upon than the words suggested. "It will make getting you upstairs simpler."

"Stairs?" he mumbled, long legs shifting uselessly against the floor-tiles, one hand pawing ineffectually at the wall in an attempt to gain his feet.

The floating light lowered and hovered in one place. The voice continued to move, coming close to him. "A moment. Here, give me your arm. Lean towards me, that's it." A pause as he was grappled with and then a grunt as he was hefted upwards, legs unfolded but unable to bear his weight. A muffled oath; the light ceased to hover and floated piercingly close. Javert tried to curl away from it but was locked in place against a solid, inescapable presence.

"Come on," the voice admonished. "Stir yourself! Work your legs!"

Somehow, by rote, by the habit of obeying an imperative as given by authority, Javert lifted one foot after the other and so was not dragged up the stairs like a sack of meal. The knuckles of his left hand knocked against the banister rails as he was propelled along; that chance percussion seemed to clear a little of his fugue. "Where is my hat?" he asked in a voice that held much of its usual certainty and vigor.

"On the parapet of the Pont au Change."

Another step. "My cane - where is my cane?"

"I haven't a damn clue."

Two more steps. "Where is my hat?"

A resigned pause. _"Merde."_ The word was strained as it had become clear that Javert's lucidity was grossly misleading. "Never mind your hat, get up the damn stairs."

Three more steps. "I feel... wrong..."

Valjean centered his weight and had time to brace a hand against the wall as the man in his grasp convulsed violently and retched up a mouthful of who-knew-what before slumping heavily. "My thanks for the warning," Valjean muttered with an edge of sourness, all too aware of how they had both nearly been pitched down the stairs. With a sigh he resettled his burden against his side and prepared to tackle the rest of his task.


	2. Chapter 2

Javert's eyes opened. They showed little interest or capability in focusing, but the fact they had opened at all was telling enough – it relayed to him the single fact he needed to be cognizant of. He was alive. In one night he had faced ruination and cataclysm; had found himself in a hell deeper than Dante ever wrote. To avoid further damnation he'd stepped into the abyss: accepted death and commended his soul, if soul he had, to whatever grim eternity awaited those such as he. (This, we may view as a paradox, given God's probation against suicide. But perhaps it is less so, when we are aware that Javert had no faith in the condemnation or forgiveness of an unseen Almighty, but only in the logic of what was just.)

And for all that, he was alive.

It was a monstrous thought to try to comprehend, and Javert did not currently feel equal to the task. He turned instead to less incomprehensible but no less important matters such as breathing: breathing was fast coming a prime concern in the muted sphere of consciousness. Which, he was well aware, was sharply humorous considering he had tried to kill himself. Was it animal instinct that fought for air? Or was it bloody minded perversity that held he would die on his own terms or not at all? He felt his chest hitch and struggled onto his side, coughing and sounding like a half drowned cat.

He was apparently not the sole holder of this opinion. "Javert," a familiar voice groaned, "you are an _unbelievable_ idiot."

Javert ignored the comment; he had other concerns in need of attention. Breathing for one, followed by forcing his eyes to work properly, translating the shapes they saw into information instead of just relaying them as coloured lumps without meaning. His efforts were hindered somewhat by further coughing fits (there was it seemed, a final cupful of river-water his lungs were loathe to give up) and by tangles of his hair which straggled across his cheeks and shoulders like disordered filigree miss-set by a slovenly craftsman.

Despite such setbacks he perceived the room he occupied was of a modest size, simple but well presented. It was lit by a small oil lamp and by the light of a fire banked high in the grate. A worn rug lined the floor; a wardrobe and washstand filled one wall; a narrow writing desk sat beneath the window and a cane-seated chair was set by the bed before the fire. The only ornament the room held was a crucifix upon the wall by the bed, and the only objects of opulence were two well crafted silver candlesticks which stood sentry upon the mantelpiece. On the floor were several discarded items of clothing, including a greatcoat and pair of tall boots.

Sat in the chair, with his hair a damp mess and a dark green housecoat wrapped about his shoulders, was an exhausted Jean Valjean, something Classical about his pose as if he was the subject of a piece by Dürer. For his part, Javert (minus coat and boots) had a little more of Hogarth about him: lain on the edge of the bed atop the counterpane there to shiver and ruin the needlework on the linen.

Valjean stood and collected something from the wardrobe, approaching the bed once more and holding it out to the other man. "Here," he said, offering a cleanly laundered shirt.

Javert looked at him with an expression akin to incredulity.

Valjean's eyebrows canted upwards. "Wet clothes will do you no good." When that produced no effect he added, "You cannot catch criminality as one might catch fleas."

Still the Inspector stared; he couldn't help it. So much had happened in the course of one night and yet it seemed to him the _pièce de résistance_, the crowing absurdity of it all was Valjean offering him a clean shirt. Was he to strip to don this convict's charity? Damned if he was! His mouth opened at last to voice such opinions when it occurred to him how undeniably childish such behaviour was. He had several issues with Valjean, placed beside these the question of a lent shirt was insignificant. He closed his mouth and after only an instant more of hesitation, accepted the proffered garment, dropping it upon the coverlet beside him and beginning to war with his waistcoat buttons.

"Do you wish assistance, or..."

Javert gritted his teeth. "I can manage."

The other man shrugged, leaving the Inspector the tattered remnants of his pride, and returned to his chair, leaning towards the fireplace and contemplation of the flames that danced there.

Any who have ever been unfortunate enough to be doused with cold water will know how miserable the experience is and how exhausting the effect. Not to mention the difficulty in unhooking buttons with chilled, stiff fingers and the fight to peal away wet cloth from skin. As such we should forgive Javert his shortness of temper; doubtless he would not want or require absolution, but we should give it none the less.

"Will you take tea?"

Javert looked up, having freed himself from his waistcoat: the wool weave was hardy and had served him well but he doubted it would ever be quite the same after tonight. As if to prove his point one of the buttons dropped to spin a forlorn pirouette on the floor.

Valjean interpreted the silence as further animosity and so brushed past it. "I shall take tea. I'll return shortly with the essentials." He nodded to the blankets - "Stay warm," – and quit the room, closing the door behind him.

With distain the Inspector allowed his waistcoat to join the button on the floor, coughed, and continued his campaign to rid himself of his sodden and silt-stained clothes. Victorious at last, Javert paused, acerbic thoughts of criminals and charity, debts and righteousness stirring his feelings to vexation. Once again he clenched his jaw until the storm had passed. And if such should appear hypocritical, consider thus: despite the mildness of the night, Javert was cold and he was tired; he wore a shirt and sat upon a bed in a house - none of which were his own. He might as well wrap himself in the covers as it hardly compounded the situation – he wasn't certain anything could. And so with such gloomy but practical thoughts, the Inspector lay under the counterpane, pulling the blankets close and curling towards the fire.

He did not believe he slept, but his eyes opened as the door latch lifted, so perhaps he had. Valjean entered, a tea caddy in one hand, a small copper kettle and pot held in the other. He busied himself by the fire, pulling two cups from the pockets of his housecoat and setting the kettle to boil.

Javert watched him, his thoughts oscillating between a mistrust he held to like a grudge and a darkly sardonic turn of humor. Until yesterday, everything in his life had made sense; everything had been orderly and in its proper place. The sun had risen, the moon had set: in the course of a day all had been turned upon its head.

He was about to take tea with 24601. Of course he was. That thought alone amidst scores of others held no sarcastic lilt, because that happenstance alone amidst scores of others almost made sense. In a nightmare, does not the everyday become threatening, in a dream does not the impossible become commonplace? And are both despite their difference of joy and horror, not equally absurd?

The Inspector, beleaguered individual that he was, felt he no longer had a pertinent grip upon reality any more than one does within a dream. That being the case, what else should he be doing? He had to admit the situation held the sort of twisted elegance that delighted writers and inspired poets: an artistic justice of a kind...

Thus turned the engine of his mind. He remained silent for some time, watching the light catch upon the kettle and the first puffs of steam rise from the spout.

Valjean had returned to his chair, angled now more towards the fire, giving the Inspector the illusion of space and the kettle the sense of being watched.

Flint grey eyes gave the other man a subtle look that edged towards disgust. "Had I known you were a miracle short," he said thickly, "I would have picked a different bridge."

Valjean twisted round. "Whatever do you mean?"

His smile was crook'd. "It has become clear to me you've been chasing sainthood. Your death was reported in the papers in '23. And yet! A year later I was on the hunt for you in Paris where you gave me the slip by Petit-Picpus." An unsteady, wolfish grin that revealed a flash of teeth. "I thought that was a miracle at the time, but have since dismissed it as no more than parlour tricks. But your escape from the barricade, your journey through the sewers with the boy – a more successful journey through Hell than Orpheus ever managed. I trust his family will be suitably grateful?" he enquired wryly. "And to gain your third merit for canonization, the return to life of one Javert, Inspector, First Class of the Paris Police."

The kettle had boiled and Valjean took it out of the fire on the wooden-handled trivet it had rested upon. Using the sleeve of his housecoat to shield his hand he poured the scalding water into the pot, dousing the leaves and causing the scent of fresh tea to rise with the steam. There were several things to be said to the Inspector's reading of events, but instead of the clashes they'd engaged in through the past it was a more recent discrepancy that snagged Valjean's attention. His chin lifted sharply and he frowned. "How do you know I succeeded with the boy? You called him a dead man when you found us by the sewer grate. I thought you only allowed us in the fiacre because you believed him a corpse."

The Inspector gave a snort of irritation followed by a look particular to him and no other – a look Valjean had seen twice in this night. How to describe such? Imagine if you will, a man bloody but unbowed. A man with lowered head who raises his eyes beneath furrowed brows with a most sarcastic and weary look, one side of his mouth pulled thin to show that although he understands the joke the Universe has bestowed – _pardon_ - if he does not find it overly funny. It was a look too that hoped for some returning gleam of understanding.

He was (as was frequently the case) disappointed. He made a 'tsk' of irritation, although whether his vexation was for Valjean's slow wits, the students' rebellion or the State's poor handling of the matter was uncertain. "This isn't Revolution, this a pissant bunch of malcontents. Oh, dangerous, I'll give them their due. They broke the peace and incited violence – I'd see them carted off just for that." Grey eyes sharp as napped stone searched Valjean's face again but came back empty of the knowledge they'd sought. He sighed. "There is blood on the streets of Paris. These students might be smooth-cheeked babes shouting idiot slogans but they have numbers, they have arms – is the National Guard to ignore them as they riot?" A second snort, and then his lips turned down at each edge as if he had unexpectedly come across something unpleasant. "The ministers will call an amnesty within the week – they must – how can they do otherwise?" Another look at Valjean, briefer than the previous, as if accepting the fact he was voicing ideas the other had not entertained. "There is martial law in the city this night." His voice lowered to a growl. "That is not _Law!_ It is a desperate gambit from a Government which has lost control – it makes me sick, frankly. A waste of time, of effort, of life and of potential."

Valjean listened, not wishing to speak for fear it might stop the Inspector's unprecedented loquaciousness. He had always known that the man venerated the law, but it was a new and slightly off-kilter revelation to know exactly what he considered 'Law' and what he considered 'government idiocy'.

"Would you rather I'd handed him over to the Guard?" Javert appeared irritated by the grateful spark that had lit in the other's eyes. "Oh – _Dieu_ – don't look at me like I have a heart that bleeds like yours! If there is an amnesty, all is to the good," his words ran on a swift current, hurrying to confirm himself not as a Liberal but simply a man of sense and honour. "If there isn't then I have his pocketbook and know well where he lives – justice is served either way."

Valjean was staring in frank fascination at the facet of character which had just been revealed to him. "I had no idea your thoughts could be so devious."

"You know nothing about my thoughts," Javert snapped.

"So enlighten me."

The corner of Javert's narrow mouth curled in distain for the question he knew was to come. He was not disappointed – he was a policeman after all.

"At the Pont au Change. Why did you let go?"

"You're not my confessor."

"Why did you let go?"

Javert found himself incapable of reply. His mind had been in turmoil, unable to chose between an unlawful act and an immoral one; a conundrum that not only made a mockery of all he had believed his entire life but burnt down such tenets and spitefully cavorted in the ashes. Everything was broken, and he could neither reconcile the jagged edges nor live amongst the razored shards. So he chose the only path he deemed viable, like Alexander severing the Gordian Knot: he chose neither, taking himself out of the equation so it need no longer vex him to madness.

Such thoughts flickered through his mind but did not make the transition into sounds upon his tongue. His voice wavered, part attempted indifference, part dissatisfaction with the words lining his mouth. "I was too exhausted to hold on."

"You shackled your wrists behind your back!"

"_I was too exhausted to hold on."_

Valjean gave him a long look realising that the Inspector was not necessarily referring to the parapet. At last he sighed and poured two cups of tea, black, unadorned and pungent. "We are both human and forever fall short not only of perfection but our own standards. You are not the only one to suffer so. Why compound the lack by throwing your life away?"

Thin lips curled and brows furrowed. "Oh, cease being so bloody sententious! I need no sermons."

"You're looking at me as if I am a zealous convert."

"Aren't you?"

"I was not so godless to begin with," Valjean corrected. "But yes, in answer, I have taken pains to always remember that my soul is in God's keeping and it is his grace alone that keeps it there." His words were soft and without sentiment, proclaiming it to be a truth, but one he recognized was not universally held. He gave the Inspector a sideways look. "And what of you?"

"What of me?" he replied testily.

"In Montreuil sur Mer, as Mayor, people told me all sorts of things; things about those in the town, in my employ, my subordinates."

Javert's eyes were suddenly cold and leaden, waiting to see how this lightning overhead would strike.

His tone was neutral. "I was told by one of the old sergeants that you were born in prison, the son of a gypsy charlatan and a galley convict."

Instead of a man upon a bed he could have been an effigy upon a bier: his face was marble, his eyes granite. "What of it?"

"Has it never occurred to you that you chose your path in life – chose law – because of your beginnings?"

For a moment the marble shattered to reveal the wolf beneath, the man's eyes reflected light like a cat's and his lip bared high, mouth contorted into a snarl, neck and shoulders rigid with fury. Javert's mouth was open almost of its own volition, words spewing to the surface like pus from a re-infected wound.

_Of course I know I made my choice because of my parents! Do you think I am an imbecile? The get of a gypsy whore and a criminal – born and nursed in a cell! No one learnt faster than I that there are two types of people and two only – those who break the law and those who uphold it. The first are spat upon and crushed under heel the second are lauded - and as it should be! I was born into inequity – I was tainted, but I swore to myself that I would rise above it – I would confound the criminality dormant within my nature and..._

Such planned response did not even fill a second of time, so fast did the words seek to escape him. "Of _course_ I..." But the Inspector had not reached his place in the world nor forged his own character with a deficiency of willpower. That will was brought swiftly to bear now, and his mouth closed with the finality of a sprung trap.

Valjean however possessed a too-full measure of empathy – something confounded souls such as Javert had reason to curse – and he smiled, a sad expression of understanding for all that had not been said. "You see?" he offered, throwing another log on the fire. "We are both converts to a better path, in our own way, and the more zealous because of them."

In his life Javert had had occasion to be mocked, by both street urchins and clever men, by those who found him inferior or who scorned his superiority. He was a man of principle; Society has always adored to lampoon any who are placed – or dare step – upon such a pedestal. But he had never had anyone expose his faults with words that ought to mock but instead offered a hand and said _'and I, my friend, and I'_. It bewildered his instinct, catching him off-guard between snarl and weary truce.

"Sit up," Valjean suggested, holding out the tea to him.

Resigned the Inspector did so, accepting the cup with a curt nod of thanks which given his current state of mind and predicament was high gratitude indeed. A moment later and that same hand was caught by Valjean, steadying the cup and securing it within the grasp of the Inspector's nerveless fingers. Javert said nothing.

Duties as host complete for now, Valjean returned to his chair and his own tea, letting the warmth of the cup seep into his fingers and the bitter-sweet scent to fill his lungs. He chuckled, a muted sound like far off thunder. "There's an expression I never thought to see on your face. _Mutiny._ Were I a captain I'd fear for my ship and my life!"

"I'm betrayed by my body. It has no business behaving thus in disregard to my wishes."

"Turn about is fair play," he said cryptically.

"What?"

"Perhaps your body considers it fair recompense for the disregard you showed it, flinging it into the Seine."

Javert made a sound of contempt, disdaining to make comment.

Valjean regarded his guest with concern, noting how he horded his tea close to his chest and how his long legs had by degrees curled tighter beneath the blankets. "Are you warm enough?"

He grimaced. "Enough of your endless concern-" his teeth bit upon another word that strove to follow; we might hazard a guess it was M. Fauchelevant's true name. "It's unbearable. Find another wretch to save."

"I see no one else in need."

The Inspector was not a gracious invalid. He rested the back of his head against the wooden board and looked down his nose at the man in the chair. "Surely there must be a starving urchin or a stray cat you could lavish your charity upon? This is Paris after all, the streets are forever crawling with such specimens."

For we who watch this scene it may seem a little strange to observe Valjean smile at Javert's spiked and surly comments. But Valjean had encountered such wit before at the Gorbeau garret when the Inspector had come upon the Patron-Minette gang arguing and had snidely offered the use of his hat so they might draw lots from it. Not a minute later he had mocked both the pistol pointed at his chest and the thief holding it. The gun had misfired and Javert had laughed. The Inspector might inspire dread in those who saw him but he was not without a wicked sense of humour.

"Do you object to my 'charity', Inspector, because you do not need it? Because it breaks your pride to accept it? Or because you do not want it? They are," he said opening his palms in what amounted to a shrug, "very different things."

"Questions!" he muttered. It should be clear to any who read this account that Javert was not a man accustomed to being questioned. He was an agent of the Law; he was one who interrogated others. (There were of course times when he reported to his superiors and answered upon any detail they might have required for clarification, but that was different.) Javert was not questioned. Not on his actions, his motives nor even on his health or the weather – it simply was not done.

"No one can survive without kindness in their life, without the aid of another." Valjean commented, showing he had no intention of letting the subject lie.

Javert's look had a hauteur to it, saying he begged to differ – an impression his words confirmed. "I have managed admirably."

For a moment, caught in the firelight, Valjean's eyes looked bruised with sorrow; the flames shifted and shadow masked him again leaving one to question whether they had seen aright. "One may manage on scraps of bread and sips of water. It may even be admirable. But that is not the same as living."

"Are you now an expert on the finer points of humanity?"

He shrugged. "I have been in a prison with murderers, thieves and unlucky fools. And I have been the mayor of a town. I've been rich and poor and met those from all walks of life. I think I know a little of human nature, yes. And you, Inspector. You were at Toulon. Did that not show you how men fair bereft of human kindness?"

"Toulon showed me a cur is a cur and petting a rabid dog will get one bit. Lefevre of the garrison. Do you remember him?" he demanded. "Had that fussy beard he was so damnably proud of, thought himself quite the dandy. Amicable pale haired little idiot. His elder brother was a priest; if you ask me young Lefevre should have joined the church too. He was an advocate of your breed of 'humanity', he'd have rather shot clouds than men." (This is, you will be aware, an exaggeration on the Inspector's behalf. Lefevre was not such an incompetent guardsman, only a little slow in shouldering his rifle. But then for good or ill speaking of the dead always garners embellishment.) "Look what happened to him! Or have you forgotten? He had the misfortune to be between a convict and an open door; had a mason's nail rammed in his back for his pains. It took him an hour to die, bleeding all over my coat and the surgeon could do nothing for him."

"I remember Lefevre," Valjean said quietly. "He was killed during the springtide storms. Pelletier did it when he broke out... He was shot in the leg as he made his escape, guards found him not two miles from the gates, huddled in a ditch. He was brought back and hanged the next morning."

"He was," Javert said with a grim satisfaction.

A weak half smile. "So. You have lived amidst treachery and brutality. But was there no redeeming point of humanity's nobler nature?"

"In Toulon?"

"Don't be purposefully obtuse. You must have had friends amongst the guards. You must have known people in the town. Would you have me believe in all your years there – or in Montreuil sur Mer – that no one did you a good turn, a kindness, just for the sake of good being done?"

"I kept to my job and they to theirs. I did not socalise in the town."

"Even in Montreuil sur Mer?"

"No."

He was genuinely surprised. "Why ever not?"

"I hadn't the time. Besides, I am told I am not very approachable." A harsh sound, not quite a laugh or a cough but holding a little of both. "Who wishes to buy a drink for the man who is watching him like a hawk, waiting for him to slip up?"

"Does the fault lie then with humanity's inability to do a good deed or your inability to accept one?"

"Does it make any difference?" he snapped.

Valjean sighed, a light sound of exasperation like a man who's friend has expressed a poor political view over a glass of brandy.

He coughed wholeheartedly this time and with a violence that left him exhausted; how he was not scalded with spilt tea is a mystery. "God above!" he growled with crooked wonderment. "I cannot stand, I feel like a shoal of fish have vomited in my lungs and I lie here discussing social doctrine with a convict."

"War makes for strange bed fellows, eh?"

There was a flippancy in the tone that grated; Javert's meagre allowance of levity vanished. "I bear your charity because I must. But I will not bear your mockery."

"_Pardon,"_ Valjean said easily. "I meant no malice by it."


	3. Chapter 3

Silence, neither easy nor hostile rose from the shadows of the room and crowned itself king; its reign was not as long as we might imagine. Valjean's reverie did not last; his mind might have held more tranquility than the Inspector's, but it was no less filled with thoughts of recent happenstance. And just as oil will float upon water when settled, so did certain ruminations rise to the foremost of his brain. He muttered to himself a phase which we know to be, _'How then? An imperfect spy?' _but which the fire masked from all other ears. All at once he started: "At Rue Saint Denis, when you joined the revolutionaries, were you armed?"

Javert blinked, unable to fathom why this thought of all thoughts had come upon Valjean and left him so wide-eyed. He glowered across his cup, took a sip of too-hot tea and glowered some more. "Of course. I had my musket."

Valjean looked at him strangely. "Primed?"

"Certainly."

"Loaded?"

The Inspector remained conspicuously silent.

The other snorted; shook his head in wonderment. "How was it they discovered you?"

"The little street-scrag recognised me – the one with the russet cap and missing teeth..." Something in his voice changed. "The one they shot as he sang..." He recovered himself. "I'd twisted his ear some weeks back, he recalled the incident and denounced me."

Valjean's eyebrows tilted. "That was enough?"

"I had my card in my pocket."

Dark eyes, first ink then gold in the firelight, widened – _"Pardieu!"_ – and then Valjean was laughing. "I thought this distemper that over-threw your judgement..."

"Your words, not mine," muttered Javert.

"…happened after Rue Saint Denis. I'm beginning to wonder if it did not manifest earlier."

From his lowly position in the bed, the Inspector managed to look wanly imperious, clearly seeking an explanation but unwilling to stoop to demanding one.

"You went to the barricade. A spy and agent of the authorities - with an unloaded musket and with your identity card in your pocket!"

"It is fitting for a public servant to carry his badge – and was I to fire upon the National Guard? Preposterous."

"What is preposterous is how you survived the night at all," Valjean countered

Javert made a noise of impatience and turned his head away, signalling how much the subject bored him. It came to him again how unlikely was the situation in which he found himself. Being called to account by a man - a criminal – who'd escaped him for nigh on twenty years. Part of him wished to rail against it, to kick and scream _'I shall have no part in it!'_. But he was not a man to set upon a path for the sake of walking nor choose an action when he saw no merit in it. He could be patient if need be: wait until his road became clear, even if it lead only back to the river. He cradled the teacup against his sternum, hoping to expel the unpleasant ice-burn of cold that lingered there.

Somewhere in the district could be heard the sound of a church bell, sonorously proclaiming the hour. It had not been the only noise to encroach upon their privacy; in parts of the city the National Guard still fired upon unruly citizens. But the smell of gunpowder was all pervasive that night, and the noise of shots many streets distant, and so neither interrupted their company as did the bell of the Notre-Dame-des-Blancs-Manteaux.

Valjean poked at the grate with a fire-iron, knocking the smaller logs to embers and making room for another piece of wood. His movements were those of one who wishes to speak or take a course of action but cannot, and so ill-contents himself with some differing pastime. Like all such activities it left him dissatisfied and he was confronted again with the true purpose he had attempted to cast-off. It is the mark of a clever man to recognise that some actions may be stopped, whilst others may only be delayed. Seeing the question lodged in his throat as the latter, Valjean spoke. "In Montreuil sur Mer... The woman, Fantine, why did you..."

"Your _questions!"_ A form of acquiescence followed distemper and the Inspector sighed. "Out of all the things to ask, this is what you choose?"

"I am curious. And between your over-reaching desire to either kill yourself or incarcerate me I place little faith in getting a second opportunity," he said easily.

Javert scowled, staring at him, hating the older man's equanimity towards events because such calm had always eluded him. "How do you do that?" he demanded with a need that bordered venom. "You have spent years evading the law and now you just shrug, wish your daughter farewell and bend your neck to the noose like a ram to slaughter."

"Even a ram knows if it spends its time butting its head against a mountain all it will get is a bloody skull."

Javert looked nonplussed.

"Come now, what choice did I have? None. You had found me – as I had always known you would. I could not kill you, and had nowhere to run. Might I try to escape later, on the way to the galleys?" He shrugged. "Perhaps. But for the time being, why rage against the inevitability of fate?"

"_Fate,"_ he spat without enthusiasm. And then quietly, "I thought you believed in God?"

"The will of God, the writ of fate, the influence of the grand spheres that hang in space and disorder our lives with strange tides – does it matter?"

Javert had not, it was true, spent much of his life in the discussion of philosophy or the natural sciences. He was however certain that Valjean was the only man on earth – the only man with such infuriating grace - who during such a discussion would belittle his own beliefs just to set another at ease. "It matters to you," he countered.

The other man smiled. "Yes. Very well. God then." His head canted to the side. "And once again you seek to deter me from what I ask."

He downed a mouthful of tea in haste to grumble, "What right have you to question me?" It was an automatic response, like a pistol primed without shot. "Oh, out with it then, there shall be no peace 'til you're done. What? What about the woman?"

"Why were you so..." Valjean made a small helpless gesture with his hands. "So _hateful_ towards her?"

Javert blinked as if struck. "Hateful?"

"You would have imprisoned her for fighting with a man who tormented her. And after, when you came to my house, to her sick-room, shouting and..."

Something in his expression changed, a sliver of self recrimination. He looked into his cup, drank the last of the tea and twitched at how it had cooled, becoming unpalatable. "Those instances are not one and the same. They are very different," he muttered, resting the empty cup amidst the blankets.

Valjean waited.

"As to the first, I was doing my job and my duty. She was guilty of..."

"She was an innocent!"

"_Are you a child to speak so?"_ he all but shouted, his voice terrible in his raw throat. He coughed, sounding unwell and displeased about it. "No one is an innocent. She had been walking the streets since Michaelmas, turning tricks for the dandies of the town and drinking brandy to numb her from the shame of it. She assaulted that spiteful oaf Bamatabois and I hauled her in. Then you came to the station-house, bleating and roaring that I should let her go when, let us not forget, it was your factory which had dismissed her in the first place. I thought you'd taken leave of your _senses."_

Valjean set his anger aside with a frown. He had imagined they were in stark opposition, but now he felt by Javert's words there was simply some point of misunderstanding between them as yet undiscovered and unexposed. "How so?"

His eyes flashed like feldspar; a moment later he uttered a huff of resignation and sank a little deeper amidst the blankets, tipping the back of his skull against the board of the bed with a dull thud. "How you manage to be at once so calculating and so block-headed is beyond me. I was doing the best I could for her! She had assaulted a citizen of the town. She claimed she'd been provoked – had any one seen this cruelty? No, not I, and no one else stepped forward. So was I to take on trust the word of a whore and send my men to arrest Bamatabois – an individual of money and not insignificant social connection?" A brief grimace which showed what he thought of _that_. "You see how it would end, do you not? Bamatabois would deny any accusations and likely have witnesses to back his claim – even if he was false, who would stand up for a street jade? He would complain to his friends, make a fuss: I would be given a dressing down by the council, she would be given twice the sentence deserved out of spite, and songs would be sung in the taverns of the Province about the Inspector, his Whore and the Gallant, making my job all the harder." He swallowed, easing the burn in his throat. "In prison she would still earn money, and she would not be out walking in the snow in a soiled ball-dress with no shawl or coat like some demented debutant! You demanded I set her at liberty – the liberty to freeze, to whore, to drink? Forgive me, but I thought little of your 'liberty'."

It was Valjean's turn to look startled, unable to comprehend that another had misread him so thoroughly. "I cared for her! I arranged for Sister Simplice to..."

"_Connard!"_ he bit, the insult seeming directed at them both in equal measure. "You quoted articles of law at me, you demanded the jade's liberty and ordered me out of the station-house! How the devil was I to know you planned to nurse her? Most public officials I know of would have tupped her in the back room and thrown her back onto the street – a convict certainly would have!"

Valjean gave a sad bark of laughter. "So we both fought each other like lions over nothing." He rubbed a hand across his eyes and brow, his expression wry at the thought of unnecessary battles and how, perhaps, the course of lives might have been altered had understanding been granted earlier. "And the second time? At my house?"

Javert's face became closed and a stillness settled upon him. "I was wrong," he said at last. He then continued in a low voice: "You had denied my authority at the station-house at a time when I was half certain you were not Monsieur le Maire but 24601. I denounced you to the Préfecture. They rebuked me, told me I was mad. Then that old cove Champmathieu turns up - what a fine development! Hat in hand and burning with contrition, I make my apology to you. Monsieur le Maire is gracious, is lenient, is everything I do not deserve, heightening my shame... And then not a week later I receive two letters which produce a profound effect upon me – to wit, I was vindicated - you _were_ 24601."

"What was the other letter?"

"My personal business is no concern of yours!" He coughed and the anger quit his voice as fast as it had arrived. "Suffice to say it was bad news, it... it effected my mood and therefore my judgement." He turned his gaze towards the ceiling and the soft shadows that flickered there. "I felt cheated. By you, by... other circumstances. I was angry. The woman just happened to be in the way." A tired exhalation; his eyes closed, his head tipped forward so that his chin all but rested upon his breast and the matted iron-grey lengths of his hair slipped forward of his shoulders. Irritated by the touch of damp hair brushing his cheek he lifted a hand to push it back; his fingers traced across the top of his cheekbone by his ear. He winced, and then looked confused, fingertips gently testing the bruised flesh between cheek and temple. _"Merde,"_ he hissed softly.

Valjean dropped his gaze to the ashes in the hearth. "My apologies," he said.

A second scowl that melted awkwardly as half-formed memories returned, of seeking the Seine's embrace and being felled before he reached it. His features rearranged themselves into a mildly sarcastic _don't mention it,_ a cast that relaxed almost as soon as it had formed.

"You once told me," Valjean offered without preamble, "it was easy to be kind, the difficulty lay in being just."

"How lugubrious of me. Was I having a very bad day?" he asked blandly.

"You were giving me your resignation."

"Ah."

It has become, as you are doubtless aware, a fashion to proclaim all writers thieves and liars of the most beggarly sort. I would, were you to give me time and ink and a sympathetic ear, make it my place to battle such slander. I will however allow that writers are sometimes slovenly, and – most often – that they own the despicable habit of skimming over incidents they should have lit upon with greater depth, all in the name of allowing a narrative to flow smoothly. I myself am guilty of many such shortcomings, but one specifically is called to mind here.

When I wrote of Javert explaining the Champmathieu incident in Montreuil sur Mer, I was a little one-sided in my account. I told of the Inspector's courageous despondency and how long-faced but straight-backed he was as he stood in the mayor's office, damning himself and his career. But I said nothing of Valjean's opinion on the singular and most startling point of the entire scene.

When I was still young, my father once told me there were men whom he had saved from bad business by his advice, and yet others who had declined his sagacity and suffered for it. Yet of those unfortunates, there were only two – one a publisher, one a merchant – who had returned to him after disaster had struck and admitted, 'you were right'. That teaches us much of human nature does it not? Man is a very social creature and even the most upright may be cowed by embarrassment and shame. When we are children, making apology is second nature to us. But when we grow into our majority we put away childish things, and our capacity for admitting we were wrong is sadly diminished.

Valjean, as mayor, had come across his share of incompetence , meanness and petty corruption; he had seen many people behave no better than squabbling infants. But he had seen very few of those same people make a graceful apology or even admit they had ever been in the wrong. Thus, when Javert came and spoke of his mistake, Valjean had two unwanted and unprecedented occurrences on his hands. Not only was his past spat up unpleasantly before him, but so was an unsolicited apology. Valjean had marvelled at the moral monster standing shame-faced in his office. He dwelt on such things now too, reminding himself that the Inspector's character was wrought of uncommon cloth.

"In Montreuil sur Mer – a month perhaps after the incident with Fantine, you came and apologised to me. Why did you?"

The Inspector's eyes narrowed and his countenance knit in a new expression: genuine puzzlement, almost naive in its absoluteness. "I don't understand."

"You owned up to denouncing me..."

The rising note in his voice caused Javert to cut in – "Yes."

"I knew nothing of it."

"That is why I told you," Javert replied with blank immediacy, still a little confused around the edges, trying to plot the path this was taking, scouting ahead for the pitfalls and spike he was sure must line the road.

"You confessed to me an offence I knew nothing about, proclaimed your guilt and asked that I mete out punishment!"

The almost comical look of bewilderment was still locked upon his features. "Yes. And?"

Valjean's confrontational tone gentled; his eyes showed a mix of wonder, of gratitude, of surprise and quiet joy. "And... nothing." A schoolboy grin – "Everything! You don't know how rare a thing that is, do you?"

The Inspector became aware of the esteem channelled in his direction and sought to sidestep it; he was not, especially this night, in any sort of mood to be lauded. "If I am not blameless before the law what right have I to champion it?" he asked, swift and low.

"That is your stance?"

He was emphatic. "Yes!"

"_That is _your_ stance,"_ Valjean repeated, quiet and quick and yet his emphasis had changed and his gaze held admiration.

Javert strove not to fidget; the whole exchange had been for him confusing and an embarrassment; like the blush and mortification a young woman of good breeding might feel being congratulated by an aunt on not having spawned illegitimate children.


	4. Chapter 4

A pause punctuated only by the snap and spit of the fire as it consumed its logs. Then:

"Why did you try to kill yourself?"

"Damn you, Valjean!" It was fortunate he was no longer holding the teacup; both hands clenched, one into a fist, one knotted in the blankets with a violence that surely would have shattered porcelain. In his fury he did not notice he had called the convict by name. "Do you never cease to interfere – never leave things be?"

Valjean shot him an amused glance; he thought the accusation a little rich. "No more than you do."

"Spare me! Make an exception," advised Javert, although he didn't expect the command to be obeyed. He was not disappointed.

"Why did you..."

He closed his eyes. "Why should I seek my own destruction, he asks. As if he did not already know!" He sighed, a short sound comprised not of self-pity but fatigue. "Can your boundless _isangelous_ powers of empathy and conscience not place you in my shoes?" His eyes opened again to peer at Valjean. (It must be remembered here that for all their encounters, Valjean had not been privy to the spinning consciousness of the Inspector's inner thoughts as we have.) Beholding the other's blameless and slightly worried look he offered up a soundless, mirthless laugh. "It would seem not! Let me set it out for you. There is a man, born in sin and privation. He swears himself to the law; not just to save his own hide – although it will – but because he has lived in the miserable depths of chaos and he would save others from such a fate. Justice is his god, Law his church and he its humble priest. The meek are saved, the sinful punished, all according to law. It is _simple."_ His eyes shone oddly, his breath was shallow as one who speaks in fervor – yet all at once he stopped, apparently dissatisfied with the beginnings of his exposition.

His mouth turned down as if at something rancid, and when he spoke again Javert's tone was strained. "I wrought my own purpose, my own place in the world and every day I strive to fulfill it. I don't wake at dawn with prayers upon my lips but with convictions... But I have failed. If I cannot fulfill my function, I have no place. What use is a key that cannot turn, a lamp that cannot light, a quill that cannot write? At the barricades I finally learnt the harshest of lessons. An uncomfortable truth may be ejurated, denied for years... But it will have its day. I thought I could weather the revelation; it transpires I cannot, much as it pains me. Ha! Pain and vexation I could overcome, but... The world has much in common with the principles of a clock. Everything must be in its place for the mechanism to keep good time. A watchmaker would never allow a needless cog to spin, alone and unhinged, cluttering up the workings of the machine."

Valjean stared at him. _"Mon Dieu!"_ he exclaimed. "Is your compulsion for order so great it pervades your thinking too? You would sweep yourself into death for fear of causing the city unnecessary disorder?"

The Inspector twitched his shoulders in a shrug. His world had never previously been subjected to such graduation of morals or choice.

The other opened his mouth and then closed it again, wondering how to tell a broken man that his life and works were not in vain, but that none the less he needed to rethink his philosophy.

The Inspector's flinty eyes read his look and settled on one of their own: the stark bitterness of one whose world had been shattered and was being rebuked for the splinters at his feet.

Contrary to belief (a belief I myself may have falsely fortified), Valjean's patience was not infinite. "You are being ridiculous," he remarked.

"Who is the more ridiculous – the man who jumps into the Seine or the man who follows him?"

Valjean laughed. "It is fortunate I do not seek your thanks."

"Indeed," he said belligerently, coughing as his ribs heaved and ached. The ex-convict's gently amused expression for his pettiness only infuriated him further. "Oh, _casse-toi!__"_

"You are in my bed," Valjean countered mildly.

A breath, and the Inspector marshaled what strength he could and prepared to force his muscles to work, his body to stand and carry him from the bed, the room, the city if need be.

"You're not going."

The firelight gilded his face with false health one second, frightening shadows the next. "Who are you to forbid me?" He had barley untangled his legs from the blankets and his feet had yet to touch the floor when Valjean moved to intercept him, reaching out a hand and pressing it against Javert's shoulder.

"Where is it you seek to go? To the river?"

To his irritation, Javert found the weight of that single palm a burden he was incapable of shifting. "What is it to you?"

Valjean looked down at him. "I shall dog your steps."

One hand cast about him briefly as if seeking to lay hold to his shackles; their obvious absence forced him to revert to the single weapon in adversity he had never been without: his sovereign authority. "I will strike you," Javert snapped.

Broad shoulders shrugged. "Deserved, perhaps."

Complacency in the face of Javert's threat only aggravated the Inspector further: he snarled.

"Peace!" the other man said. "You're near destroyed and far from your right mind. You will be calm and you will be still and for tonight at least – or what remains of it - you will have the natural decency to accept the hospitality I offer to you as one civilized man to another. Can you grasp such common sense, Inspector?"

Javert's eyes narrowed briefly at the title, suspecting mockery, but subsiding when he detected none. "There is nothing 'common' about your sense," he muttered with acrimony.

Valjean let out a gruff chuckle and shook his head, but he did not remove his hand.

Without the energy to fight further he yielded, crumbling back against the blankets.

"Explain to me," Valjean demanded as he sat in his chair once more. "You spoke of failure. How is it you have failed? I have never known a man so unfailingly true to his duty, never known one to hold to what he believed was right no matter the consequences for himself. You are a person of great character – the most just man I have ever known." He had meant it as a compliment, but even as the words left his lips he realized that was Javert's greatest weakness also. He strove to be Justice personified – but, like Justice, he was blind, bound irreparably by the rules he followed, hindered forever by the sword of truth and scales of worth he carried when both sword and scales were absolutes, ill suited to the messy, complicated mire of humanity's existence.

"How have you failed?" he asked again, but this time although he had meant it to be rhetoric, he recognized the question for what it was, a crude hook designed to force the Inspector to see his own shortcomings and find some way beyond them.

Javert met his gaze, the defiant tilt of his head wilting into uncertainty and self-recrimination. "And _you_ lecture _me_ on duty," he quipped bitterly – a deflection, and a poor one at that. He closed his eyes, seeming disappointed in himself and yet so sick of such an emotion. "I did not spend all those intervening years chasing you and nothing else." He opened his eyes again and their depths held a brief spark of amusement as if reproaching the convict for thinking himself so important. "Sorry to disappoint." A wry crook of his mouth. "But when our paths crossed, duty demanded that I pursue you to the best of my ability and bring you to account, as I would have with any other. Perhaps..." his voice lowered. "Perhaps my point of hubris was to believe it was my duty – _my_ duty – to bring you in. It ceased to be a matter of justice – impersonal, it became..." his words faded to silence. After a moment or so more his face rearranged itself into the mask of a smile, cracked to the core and revealing the wormwood beneath. "Obsession leads to pride, pride to hubris, hubris to nemesis and so are those who think themselves mighty laid low."

Valjean very much doubted the man had ever thought of himself as 'mighty' in his life. Correct – unfailingly - but no other such conceit. "So that is your grand sin?" he asked gently. "In your pursuit of me, in your refusal to allow any crime to remain unpunished, you ceased to be an agent of justice and instead dared assume its mantel?"

This conversation did not seem to be treating the Inspector kindly, indeed it pushed limits already sorely tested. Javert's voice was a monotone, as ragged and shadowed as the rest of him. His eyes were empty and stared ahead of him like those of the dead. "24601 was a criminal – a thief, a liar, the lowest scum of society as all convicts are. And yet when I found him again he had become Mayor. That, one may overlook – politicians are liars after all and those in a small town may be deceived by wealth, by smart clothes and a firm handshake. You took the whore's child – I thought it an excuse – a device by which you meant to escape," he rasped. "24601 was always seeking to escape – why should time have changed him?" Javert swallowed, and it could have been the burn of the Seine still in his throat or the weight of such words he forced himself to speak as if spitting up stones. "Criminality is a disease – a pathogen in the blood that cannot be purged." His voice hollowed to a whisper, like one mumbling a prayer to a god they had seen slain with their own eyes: a truth they had held as absolute, now cruelly toppled. "And yet you – damn you – you break the bounds of everything I stand for! You are a criminal and a good man. A felon and a martyr. A selfless thief! And your _mercy..."_ That word was hollowest of all. "Do you know what your damned mercy did to me at the barricade? _Dieu!_ The barricade... you should have killed me."

Valjean understood then in a way that had eluded him before. Javert's statement was not one born of a self destructive instinct. He hadn't wished to die – but he had expected it, believed in it as the night the day – for what else was 24601 to do with the law but slay it when given the chance? So Valjean's epiphany was thus: when he had fired his pistol into the air, he had unwittingly committed a bloodless murder.

The older man bowed his head, hiding the strange mix of anger and pity battling across his features. "I was a man before my name was stripped from me and I became 24601. And, by the infinite grace of God, my humanity was returned to me shortly after my name. A one time thief is not a killer. And if a thief may enter Paradise, surely even a murderer may find redemption."

Here we should recall that with the Revolution, France had undergone not only a social but an intellectual Renaissance. Outmoded sentiment had been replaced with science, and, although a wider philosophy had been allowed to return as the Republic failed, in many State institutions the unforgiving glare of 'Enlightenment' still burnt. Javert was in no way singular in the opinions he held: that nature forged a man from birth with a predisposition towards good or ill and that no punishment or redemption could ever fully erase what nature had wrought.

Valjean did not subscribe to the idea that criminality was an accident of birth, a defect of the brain. But he would never deny how close his soul had come to being lost had it not been for actions of Bishop Myriel.

"I do not understand you," the Inspector accused. "I have never understood you. Watched for you, studied you when you turned up again like a gypsy's hexed sous, tried to find where you would go next, where your plans lay. But any time I thought I knew you – could track you – then you would do something inconceivable – inconceivable in its impossibility or its stupidity. Both sometimes. You are not a fool – or perhaps you are but you're not simple-minded. Yet for all that, here I am, no cane, no shackles, no strength. And you've offered me tea."

"What should I have done?"

"Killed me! Left me. Spat on me – what any convict would do."

Valjean shook his head. "I am not any convict. I am myself."

"_What do you want of me?"_

The edge to that plea, honed sharp enough to cut, surprised him. He had not imagined that Javert would have thought this could be prelude to a plot. "Why should I want anything of you?"

Javert's eyes spiked to mercury, cold, wide and clear. "You madden me. Why? Why did you rescue me?"

Valjean considered pointing out that suicide was a sin, and that although the Almighty was forgiving, one should never tax his good will. He considered saying he deplored the loss of life or that he'd decided to give himself up and Javert's death interfered with his plans. He considered saying he would do the same for anyone. Above all he considered saying _'Because you are Javert,'_ the most enigmatic of the lot but the weightiest by far. Instead he spoke thus: "And so we are back to whether kindness can ever be done for kindess' sake. I saw a play once, some years ago now. It was a tragedy about a black-a-moor who fell prey to jealousy. His lieutenant, I forget his name, had a habit of seeing every virtue as a vice, twisting even the purest deed until it became rank."

"I've never needed to twist anybody's motives to reveal them as corrupt," the Inspector muttered.

"I'd never accuse you of such. But you are apparently incapable of accepting that good may be its own reward."

"I'm incapable of accepting that one with a pathological tendency towards gross dishonesty can ever be honest, yes!"

"A leopard cannot change its spots, is that it? We are born to good or evil and can do nothing else? What of you?" he challenged. "You said you were born in perfidy..."

"Stop this..." he warned.

"...how is it you managed..."

"Stop..."

"...to be a just and upright man?"

"_I always knew I would fall!"_ It was a choked howl and gave Valjean what no other had ever been granted: a glimpse into the soul of Javert.

There is often, at the very core of great men, a seed of fear which drives them. They are stout fellows of character in every other regard (and having faced capture and then execution at the barricades with stalwart equanimity no one could possibly name Javert a coward) but for this one flaw. And so it was with the Inspector. He had been taught by lesson and example that wickedness would out, that one born damned remained damned. His whole life had been lived with the fiercest determination to see right prosper, whilst in his heart, like a black stone, lived the terrible knowledge that for all his vigilance, all his effort, one day he would do wrong.

Valjean stared at him, realising, as we must, how grimly Javert's own beliefs had shaped and pinioned him. How courageous also the man who builds his empire alone, brick upon brick, knowing that it was prescited to ruin from the start and by his own hand no less.

"What wrong did you do?" It was a terrible question to ask, a searching private question that gave no quarter to the metaphysical wound thus revealed but instead pressed a burning brand against it. "Was it the boy – Marius?" The guess missed its mark; the brand seared and cauterised nothing.

"I have told you, justice was better served with him alive. I regret nothing I did in regards to your stray schoolboy revolutionary." Javert's words were pale attempts to buy himself time; the longer he spent refuting the topic of Marius Pontmercy, the longer he was spared from being asked a second time.

"Then what?"

Lacking a subject in the specific, Javert was able to ignore it and gave no answer.

"You said it was because I let you go, but if that is a fault then it lies not with you. What then?" His eyebrows folded lower, drawing together in perplexity, his gaze a little unfocused as he sorted through the events of the night like a tailor's apprentice rummaging through remnants of cloth. "I gave myself to your custody. We took the fiacre here and you gave me permission to say my farewells; when I looked from the window you were gone. Why did you leave? Why not take me to the station-house?" It jarred against logic to believe that the Inspector, so assiduous, should leave his prey when he'd won the hunt at last. A felon to the cells, a report to the Préfecture, a freeman to the streets, that was the way of it... His brows rose as if released on a spring. "Was it your intention to arrest me?"

Javert looked queasy, the look of a mauled soldier who catches sight again of his shattered or missing limb that once was whole.

"You were letting me go. Is that it? Is that what drove you to the Pont au Change?"

"You have the mind of a Jesuit! Forever needling at details. Less a church mouse than a holy shrew..."

"Javert!" The name was called sharply, summoning straying attention and curtailing rambling.

He stared back at him, fevered and sullen, a brief spark of rebellion in his look that melted to something darker and more vultuous by far. "Yes. Does that satisfy you? I couldn't arrest you. The law demanded it of me and I could not. And I knew that it was not a moment of weakness I could mend later; my choice was made and no matter if I saw you again every day until I died I would not change. I, who have never failed in my duty, failed – no! Not failed - raised my fist and struck against all I'd upheld." He laughed a curious sound that held more in common with a death-rattle then merriment. "I stood on your doorstep. The moments passed and I realised I had dismissed the fiacre. My shackles stayed within my pocket. My cane beneath my arm and my hands clasped at my back. In short, I had done nothing to prepare for your arrest. The implication of this escaped me, a message not passed from one signal post to the next so the news is delayed although the disaster is already done. I knew a blissful minute of idleness, and then I felt I'd been stuck by a thunderbolt: for a second I couldn't see, pain and blood thundered in my mind like a cannonshot at the knowledge that I was not going to arrest you. The decision had already been made, it arrived in my skull as a _fait accompli_. I dropped my cane, dropped to my knees, clutching my head as if it would shatter. And the worst of it, the damnable misery of it was I wasn't surprised. I had always known..." His mouth split into a smile like the burst skin of rotten fruit. "Always known somehow it would happen."

Valjean remembered in Montreuil sur Mer when Javert had thought himself at fault. For that – an act of insurrection – he had pled his dismissal though it would blight his career. His honour demanded he be as unflinching in punishment with himself as with the lawless wretches that came his way. What then would his implacable honour demand for an act of treason? Death, nothing less.

The older man felt a moment of shame at his own arrogance. He had seen plainly Javert was in need of help and had thought he was the one to aid him. His folly had not been in jumping in to save him, but in thinking it was that easy. The fight, the true battle was not against the cold currents of the river, but against all the anguish that had forced the precipitation in the first place. _Putain – an incompetent surgeon you'd make,_ Valjean admonished. _Congratulate yourself on cauterising the wound when gangrene festers in his blood! And that, Jean, is what God gives you for your assumptions – more toil! Ah, yours is a deserving back, best hope your shoulders are broad enough for it..._

Javert watched as the other man closed his eyes with a scowl, and since he was not privy to Valjean's private monologue, he interpreted such looks as any would. His smile spread like a plague. "Now you know, much good may it do you. Are you sorry for fishing me out yet?"

He shook his head, as much at his own short-sightedness as to refute Javert's words.

"Your pardon," the Inspector continued insincerely, "my thanks for such heroics is tardy and likely to remain so. I suppose the best I might hope for is you come to see the folly of your actions and throw me back."

"I do not and shall not regret my acts."

An eyebrow rose like a carrion crow in flight. "Grand words. You'll recant them by morning."

"Why?"

"Even doctors recognise some in their charge cannot be saved," Javert explained, echoing closely Valjean's choice of metaphor. "Which is better? To continue flogging a half-corpse in the hope that it will dance? Or to allow it out of its misery?" A flash of the pestilent smile lit in his eyes, seeking to pass on a sliver of his pain. _"Which is the more merciful?"_

For some time Valjean was both still and silent, and little could be read either in the expression of his face or the lines of his posture. "Do you mean that?"

Javert was distracted by the malaise in his throat and did not answer immediately. His look carried the question he had not air to voice.

"Do you honestly believe that it would be better had you drowned?" the older man clarified.

The cough faded but his grimace grew. "I have never told a lie in my life. What on earth should possess me to start now?"

It occurred to Valjean to quibble that calling Marius a corpse was not strictly truth. (Nor, all things considered was it a lie, the boy had hovered upon the cusp and which way he might fall was less a matter of veracity than opinion.) It was but a minor point, a distraction from the true line of enquiry. Though honour required Javert gave an account of himself to one he was twice indebted to, there was nothing to say he might not deflect, delay and obfuscate in the mean while. Valjean paused, although he could not swear whether he did so to give himself space to think or respite to the man he harried so incessantly. That he, the long-hunted, should seek to give rest to his adversary was a situation not without humour and he bit his lip lest he laugh.

Javert was not so wrapped in his misery and his weakness that he didn't notice. He failed to keep the dislike from his voice. "This amuses you."

"No," Valjean denied in haste. "It does not. But there is a dark humour at work none the less, do you not think?"

"Don't speak to me of farce," he growled. "I haven't the stomach for it."

"You have the stomach for very little at present," Valjean agreed, a tacit apology.

Silence again. The fire flickered in the hearth, casting light and shadow with equal indifference upon the occupants of the little room.

The Inspector, ever a man for which silence had been a welcome bastion, found himself unexpectedly discomforted. He fidgeted. "For god's sake, I will be told! What would you have of me?"

The query was simple enough but the animosity at it s core took Valjean by surprise. "Pardon?" He had heard aright, it was the tone he questioned.

Javert remained silent, a challenge of sorts.

"What would I have of you?" Valjean echoed.

"You have no plan?"

"I..."

His head snapped to fix upon Valjean, confrontation writ sternly in the line of his jaw. "You have no agenda?" There was a second when his face struggled between humour and ire; irascibility won out. "The man who would not be bound, who broke parole and successfully disappeared more times than I care to count, who recreated himself as a gentleman – a businessman - a mayor! – has no plan? All those times you escaped me was nothing but – what? A whim and good luck?" His voice had worn to a rasp again. "How disappointing! That speaks poorly of my ability – here I was hoping that for all your unpredictability you actually had a map, a master scheme in mind for whatever you enacted. Ah! And by your look you claim ignorance!" He coughed again. "Very well, I shall be plain: would you have me believe there was no hidden motive – no angle you sought in saving me?"

"I..." Valjean stopped. It was a trap of sorts. To say he had jumped into danger, risked death to save Javert was to make his goodness appear a weakness, an act not of valour but stupidity. And whilst he shied from claiming heroism that did not mean he wished to be thought a half-wit. But to admit there was a reason – which there had been – would in turn mean admitting he was not entirely certain how to explain such. It had been for him a matter of instinct when he had seen Javert upon the parapet, a gnosis as profound as it was plain: he could not allow the man he saw to destroy himself. He'd had no time to question his motives, they remained foggy things to him, secondary and unimportant when weighed against the knowledge that it was wrong for Javert to die. "I would see you well." It was both truth and evasion all at once.

The Inspector dismissed the truth with an irritated sound deep in his chest and recognised the evasion for what it was. It had not escaped his notice that what with the weight of circumstance, Valjean had wrung from him myriad answers he'd rather had not been given, and yet he'd precious little information in return for his pain.

In truth the drama of the night coupled with his weakness and with the surreality of lying in a bed and speaking with a man so many years his adversary whilst the city gave way to uneasy sleep made him feel as if he was drunk.

(He had been drunk twice in his life and had decided long ago that was twice too many. What idiot would court feelings of sickness, of helter-skelter uncertainty, of false bravado and false hilarity that made one act the ass and left its heavy mark come morning? He had kicked enough reeling sots out of gutters and into a cell in his time and had always found the stories of drunken camaraderie and revels hard to square with the sorry addled mess he had to haul to the stationhouse.)

But perhaps, he thought, perhaps it was a little like this. A sick feeling in your stomach, low down and easy enough to ignore if you didn't move. A weakness locked in your bones that made your hand shake and your sight waver at the edges. A sensation akin to the fatality one experienced in a dream, accepting events as they unfurled because how else should they play out? A haziness of the mind and a loosening of the tongue, whilst deep in the lockbox of one's skull, you cursed yourself for every kind of fool but hadn't the wherewithal to stop. Yes, that sounded very much like inebriation...

How ridiculous the Seine had made him drunk! Homer had called the sea 'wine dark' – did he know something others did not? Were the vintners of the Loire sending their goods to Paris not by the cask but the wave? Wait - was the Loire upon the Seine? It must be! But was it upstream? Damn, that was the puzzle...

He opened his mouth to ask, or at least form some mangled attempt, but his folly was caught upon the razors of reason still glinting sharp in his spinning mind and the throat of the query was cut and left bleeding upon his lips. He gave a start, a horrified twitch at how far his mind was falling and how he feared he couldn't stop it.

Valjean saw the Inspector flinch like a steel-toed boot had just kicked under his ribs, saw smoke-grey eyes freeze as panic gnawed closer. Instinctively he hunched forward, reached out a hand and laid it upon the Inspector's shoulder. "Easy," he soothed. "Easy." And then in a lie that was inspired in its ability to salve Javert's pride (which was sure to come up fighting and fighting dirty at that) he murmured, "You are chilled. It's my fault, I've neglected the fire." And he bent to the wood basket, one hand still stretched towards Javert as if in apology, and threw another log to the flames.


	5. Chapter 5

Javert watched him, the fog of Pan's song clearing from his face as mist is burnt away by the sun on an autumn morning. If one watched his eyes closely, the shadowed skin beneath them, the dark brows above them, the flex of the silvered iris and the narrowing of the pupil, a student of physiognomy would conclude that he did not entirely believe Valjean's convenient fiction. But, like one promised toil today for cake on the morrow he was willing to tolerate it because he was too beaten to do otherwise.

I would beg your indulgence whilst I make a comparison here and set it down. It is well known that children have a certain perversity within their natures that time has yet to smooth. They are perverse through ignorance, through curiosity, occasionally through spite but mostly for the shear devilry of it. In this way, a young mother may set a dish of pottage before her child and the child will refuse to eat it. The mother will scold, the mother will beg. The mother will speak on the noble nature of the dish set upon the table, extolling its virtues. The mother will in short try all that is within her power to entice her child to eat. Before long however, what began as whim on the infant's behalf will become stubbornness and they refuse the pottage, no matter how hungry they grow. Those with a deeper knowledge of human nature (or of children) will know the answer. If the mother should leave both dish and child alone for a time, when she returns she will be sure to find the bowl empty and the child full.

I fear I have been, on the subject of Javert, like an inexperienced mother trying to force-feed her child. I have been at pains throughout this record to show him as a good man, for he is – although flawed. Yet the more stalwart, the more upright I show him, the more his name is despised. So here I seek to redress my error: I show you Javert humbled most cruelly, show him turned about, torn apart and holding fast to his honour and his pride for they are the only things he has. I no longer ask you to admire this man of principle; unadorned I present him to you and hope instead that you find it in your hearts to understand him. In doing so you will make the very same journey that Valjean had made that night.

With quiescence returned a measure of strength and clarity. Javert swallowed, unable to sooth his throat. "You must be enjoying this," he accused.

He raised an eyebrow, skeptically amused. "Oh yes. How can I deny the years I relieved the agony and boredom of my toil by dreaming of this very happenstance?"

"Sarcasm doesn't become you."

"My apologies," he said placidly. "It must be catching." Yet beneath the calm veneer of his words he was unaccountably irritated with the man. What was worse was that the ire he felt was an emotion created solely to distract him from his worry. This defeated half-corpse with the Inspector's voice and the Inspector's face but lacking any of his drive and certainty... was not, _could not_ be Javert. Valjean should have been relieved; instead he was deeply disquieted. It was an abomination. The sky might well have turned green, the grass turned blue. "Do you believe in God?" he asked suddenly.

"I believe in justice."

"Ah. That is not the same," he chided.

"No," Javert admitted, bowing his head.

Valjean gazed at him for a while in the manner of one who has caught sight of a wild and rare creature and does not wish to risk its flight by making eye contact or any sudden movement and so watches, covert, unable to draw away.

Javert for his part looked wary. He had taught himself to be a quick study of character; it was a useful skill that had saved his life on several occasions when he surmised in a look that this individual or that not only carried a stiletto or club but was keen to use it. In Valjean he had adjusted his opinion to now include a circumspect regard for the man's arsenal of philosophy and argument. His questions were childlike: unabashed, candid, and frequently with a simple brutality behind their innocence. The Inspector could tell that the man sat in his green housecoat, with his short mane of ash-white hair, dark eyes and aged classic brow was about to ask another of his fiendish questions – there was that aura about him.

He was right, of course.

"What would someone say of you? If they were asked to give an account of your character?"

"My own account is not satisfactory - have I lost my mind?"

Valjean looked amused but did not quite dare to treat the question seriously. "If you like," he said evenly. "What would they say of you?"

Javert flicked the briefest look of irritation his way. _"__Ne me prenez pas pour un con__!_ That is a foolish question – a pathetic means of masking your true demand."

"How so?"

"You do not say 'what have people said of you' nor 'what words have been used in report of you'. That would be a relayed opinion of other's views. But no, instead you ask 'what _would_ they say' – a hypothetical, tailored by my own opinion of me. You might as well be more straightforward in your dealings and ask what do _I_ think of me."

"But I did not."

Javert gave him a long and calculated look. "Very well," he said heavily. "What would someone say?" He stopped, weighing his thoughts. "It depends very much on the someone, does it not?"

Valjean sighed shortly. "You claim I needle at the finer points!"

Javert's expression was one that quite eloquently pointed out that he was, after all, a policeman, and investigation and the pursuit of detail was his business.

"A contemporary. Not an urchin who only cares you have heavy boots, nor an aristocrat who thinks only for the cut of your coat. Someone with a modicum of understanding."

Javert's annoyance at the question did not abate, although he felt bound to answer; this night whatever question was put to him by the convict he would answer, paying it as he would a tax. "You mean someone in a similar position but yet not me. Very well. They would say... would say..." Something which looked a little like regret bled into his expression. "They would say I did my duty, bided by the rules yet had my own way about me. That, incidentally would be a polite way of saying I'm difficult. They'd say I was a dark horse and that I meant business. This would be a neat way of explaining I didn't drink with them at the inn, they knew nothing about me other than I had never falsified a report or taken a bribe."

He shook his head. "That is not you – that is how you do your job."

"They are one and the same."

Valjean's brow dipped giving him a look of searching and of sympathy. "Are they?"

Javert scowled and looked away. His fingers twisted and uncurled amidst the blankets. "And what of you?" He challenged. "What would one say of you?"

He smiled, briefly, like a conjuring trick. "When have they known me? Do they know Valjean who tried to care for his sister's family? Jean the Jack of Toulon? Monsieur Madeleine who became mayor of Montreuil sur Mer? Ultimas Fauchelevent of Petit-Picpus? Monsieur Fabre of Paris? Who?"

"All of them. You."

His head tilted almost imperceptibly into an attitude of quiet curiosity. "I don't know. What do you think," he asked, "Javert?"

The Inspector stilled like a creature who was hoping the hunter's eye would pass him by. He could voice his opinion of Valjean, but it was a new conclusion – or rather, an old conclusion refashioned and refined and he was not at ease with it yet; perhaps never could be.

Valjean recognised what cheap playwrights like to term 'a pregnant pause'; a breath taken but never given flight because the words are too weighty to trip off the tongue without choking. He smiled ruefully. "If someone had known me all my days, they might say I was a man more blessed than I had a right to be, but that I tried to repay what I could."

Javert did not approve of the answer: every which way he turned it, it was unsatisfactory in his sight. "That scarcely seems to cover it."

"No? Well, we were not musing upon a biography of our lives, merely a fleeting opinion."

"Why were you musing upon opinions at all?"

He looked down at his hands and then across at the sword-grey eyes and pale face of his guest. "Because you are not the man I thought you were," he admitted simply. "I should say rather you are every bit the man I thought you were, but... Have you ever seen one of those painted illusions?" He asked suddenly. "A penned picture of Pierrot and Colombine at a table. Or perhaps a fashionable young mademoiselle with hat and necklace. And it would appear that is all they are. But if you are told – or shown – if the angle changes... Suddenly it is not the lovers but a giant skull. It is not the young lady turning her face away but a grinning old witch with a hooked chin! You see plainly an image and believe that is all there is, but circumstances prove you wrong and..."

"You realise beneath the veneer of life and beauty is decrepitude and death," he said sardonically.

"Metaphor is not my strong point."

Silence stretched like a cat at the hearth; Valjean looked at the empty kettle, whilst Javert allowed his eyes to rest beneath lowered lids. As before, the quiet did not last.

"If you met yourself," Valjean enquired, "what would you think?"

Eyes remained closed, pinned beneath jagged brows. "Oh ask what you mean!"

"What do I mean?"

His words were tired, peppered with asperity and still his eyes were closed as if that could shield him from the full frustration he felt. "You do not mean 'would I partake happily of my own company' – that is a nonsense, I have kept my own company for years. What you truly mean is 'do I have any regrets?'"

He saw the sense in that. "Very well. Do you?"

"_Mon Dieu_, you pulled me from the river only to badger me to death. Damn your questions!"

"I thought they were your bread and meat?"

"I find this dish not to my taste."

Valjean saw that without meaning to he had once again pressed too far. "I'm sorry, I talk too much..."

A grim flash of teeth at the irony. "The eccentrically reclusive Monsieur le Maire talks too much!"

"Perhaps," he said, "I have never before found anyone with whom I could speak."

Silence again, as they both considered that.

Here I interrupt my narrative to offer you a truth, profound as any I have encountered: the greatest tragedy in this world, is to be unloved, disregarded. However pure a soul, however noble its intentions, without due love it will falter and fail, withering as an untended vine. Philosophy is a fine thing and words may mend much, but without action such succour is fleeting at best. Valjean did not dare dwell on what his life might have become had he not been shown respect by the Bishop, and afterwards been given the love of the innocent Cosette. It troubled him that a man he found he liked – despite circumstance and reason – could have had a life so empty of such contact.

Valjean had heard tell once or twice of men on the battlefield who became ghosts of themselves, barely aware of their own name, losing themselves in lies or in forgetfulness. The tyranny of war had overcome them - drowned them - and losing themselves was the only coin they had left to play. He thought perhaps a similar thing had happened to the Inspector – or would have, had the policeman's pride not forbidden him such half-hearted escape. For one so unbending, losing one's life was preferable to losing oneself. The ex-convict wished fervently to impart what he had learnt from experience: being forced to change one's character, one's name, one's self, was not necessarily a defeat, could indeed be carried into the greatest of victories. And such change, however brutal and daunting, was not worse than death. Where there is life, there is hope. Where there is hope, there can be redemption. Valjean was neither by nature or training an orator; he did not know how to make such words palatable to the Inspector and feared he'd do more harm than good should he try. _"Where there is life there is hope,"_ he murmured forlornly to himself, displeased by his own short-comings.

"What?"

He shook his head. "Nothing."

"Are you trying to save my soul?" Javert demanded suspiciously.

"I see no communion wafers here."

"I would not put it past you to try with nothing but a pot of tea."

"Is that a miracle or blasphemy?" Valjean asked with a smile.

"I don't believe in souls. You're wasting your time."

"You believe in the law."

"Yes."

"That does not leave much room for beauty or love, second chances, or..."

"Should it?"

"Yes."

The Inspector looked disgruntled. "How can you be so happy in your uncertainty? You're surrounded by ambiguity! How can you even _function?"_

He shrugged. "I trust in God and the wider wonders of the world."

"Libertarian," he accused immediately.

"Ha! My household and daughter would disagree."

The Inspector fell silent, discomforted and confused by the amicability of the exchange, batting words back and forth like a verbal game of _Jeu de Paume._

The other man read Javert's soundless state for what it was: a retreat. "What are you afraid of?"

"_Ta gueule."_ It was he was aware, unworthy of him. What's more it was hardly a witty rejoinder to make Voltaire proud. He wished he could take it back – a foolish thought since words unlike lace may never be un-spun. _"Everything is for the best, in this the best of all possible worlds,"_ he muttered with derision.

Valjean looked at him in unguarded surprise. He had not imagined a man such as Javert would read Candide. "So said Dr Pangloss. '_After all, I'm a Philosopher and it wouldn't be proper for me to recant since Leibniz cannot be wrong and preestablished harmony is the most beautiful thing in the world along with plenum and subtle matter.'_"

"Do you have even the first idea what any of that means?"

The once Monsieur le Maire smiled sheepishly. "Not in the least, but I thought it was beautifully worded. I came late in life to my schooling. And you? I would have thought Rousseau more to your taste."

"I hadn't the time; Candid was shorter," Javert dismissed mordantly with a cough.

Valjean laughed. "Do you agree with him though?"

"Pangloss?"

"No! Voltaire. The idea that one should think less on theomeny and address instead the three great evils of boredom, vice, and poverty."

Even moribund, Javert made for a sarcastic corpse. "You throw up 'pre-established harmony' without a clue to its meaning and then follow on with 'theomeny'..."

He shrugged apologetically. "I did spend a long time as a convent gardener."

The Inspector made a curious sound like a man trying to swallow his own laugh.

Silence - that third and ephemeral presence in the room - stretched between them, like thread unwound on a spool, tying them in ways they could neither define nor articulate. The truce was broken as the water that had lodged in Javert's lungs and given rise to his weakness made another bid to escape; he was overcome with a wracking fit quite as wrenching as one suffering from tuberculosis. He made no complaint, in part because he hadn't the energy but for the most because he had much of the Spartan about him, it had never been his way to give over and wallow in infirmity.

Valjean was forced to listen to the scatter-shot sounds of his coughing and his struggle for breath, his shivering attempts to bring his body to order. The ex-convict fixed his eyes through habit upon the crucifix that adorned the wall and then closed them, bowing his head and clasping his hands together in an attitude of prayer. Had we come upon this scene unmindful of the situation we would have thought that Valjean watched over a brother or someone else dear to his heart but beyond his help.

He did not see, as we do, the Inspector's gaze light upon him between coughing and his expression twist with a further spike of vexation. When he was able, he spoke. "I'm not at death's door. Don't be so melodramatic."

Valjean's attention snapped back to his charge, both in gratitude and in chagrin. For a second he was beyond speech, silenced by the effrontery of the statement. "Don't be - ? I wasn't the one who leapt from a bridge in a fit of..." He was aware of Javert watching him, aware too of a subtle light that silvered his eyes and the smallest tensing of a muscle that raised one corner of his mouth. The well of his words and his indignation dried immediately as he realised the Inspector had said it to bait, just as a boy might tease a cat to watch it hiss or light a pinch of powder to watch it spark. He chuckled. "Doesn't that get you into trouble at the station house?"

"What?"

"That sevedical humour of yours."

"I believe it scurries under the noses of most. It is widely recognised I am without humour."

Valjean felt again a pang and a quickening towards this man whose character was so subsumed by his duty it went unnoticed by all who knew him. "Tell me something," he said impulsively. "Tell me of a friend, a relative, a lover – anyone." He had a need to know that there was someone, one single solitary soul upon God's earth, who knew the true cut of Javert's character, seeing beneath the ice to the fathoms below.

The mercurial sheen faded from his look like a carcass slowly cooling. "Why? What on earth is it to you?" Ah – such a question! Even in his wretched state the Inspector possessed senses which could delve to the heart of a matter and force all to be abandoned or revealed; such is the skill of a policeman.

"The only person you have mentioned this night with any familiarity is a dead guard..."

"Do you ask to reassure yourself I am capable of human feeling? Accept I am heartless and move on." Valjean sought to counter his barbs but the Inspector continued. "Or perhaps you wished to know how the world would turn without me in it? It would turn," he said phlegmatically.

"There must be someone who would..."

"There is no one."

"No family?"

A gruff, dry laugh. "Oh, doubtless my father sired quite the tribe in his day before his stupidity landed him in the galleys. The less spoken on my mother the better; she was a whore and a charlatan. So. I know of no siblings and do not care to." A little of the poison drained from his tone. "There – there was a grandfather. But he died years ago."

Valjean had never heard anyone speak so bluntly, so ill humouredly, on their parentage. "You do not varnish your opinion."

"I've never found need. There is silence or there is truth, polish is for buttons and muskets."


	6. Chapter 6

Valjean had in his time been a solitary man, he'd been considered an oddity for his reclusive ways in Montreuil sur Mer. But there had been a friend here and there down the years, and of course there had been Cosette. He could not imagine a life without those points of contact. "You must have had..."

"I have found my own company to be sufficient."

"Sufficient – that word! Surely you must have wished for..."

"If wishes were horses," Javert said with cold finality, "then beggars would ride. Cease on this tiresome quest of yours, it brings no profit to you. Must I spell everything out? It seems to me the only person so effected by my disappearance from this world – save for an irritated Préfect and, doubtless, some priest wringing his hands - would be _you_ because it would free you from..."

"It would have cheated me of the association of an admirable man I regret having never known as a friend."

I set this down freely: it was a curiosity for Valjean to find himself so at ease in the company of his enemy. He thought at first it had just been a form of relief: now the sting had been drawn from his pursuing demon he could and had afforded magnanimity. But, he realised, it was more than that. Who better to keep in the company of? This admirably infuriatingly dogged man had been a piece of his life for so long, had watched for him, followed him like a shadow, learnt what could be gleaned of his habits...

Valjean remembered reading that in the ancient lands of pagan Egypt, a shadow was counted as a companion spirit, a soul of sorts. And why not? For it was a counterpart to a man, forever with him, hidden in darkness and revealed in light but inescapable, inseparable.

Two faces of a coin, so long in opposition, seeking to trump each other as heads or tails and now, this night, in the final spin, it seemed to Valjean that the impossible had happened: the coin had landed upon its edge, leaving them to decide whether they had equal share in victory or defeat.

"We are two sides to a coin," he said aloud.

"I do not see how we were minted of the same ore."

Valjean knew the opinion he pressed was reckless but he could not let it lie any more than he had been able to let old Fauchelevent lie crushed beneath the cart – it was not his way. "We are," he insisted, "and yet you will not see it although you have argued its case."

"I've done no such..."

"You told me you believed everyone is born to good or ill and cannot escape the nature allotted them. Yet this night you saw that I – a convict – defied my mould by being righteous. So you learn your belief is flawed. Yet in acknowledging this and releasing me you believed you had conformed at last to your true moulding by being unlawful. That is not logic," he insisted, "that is a fallacy of your own making!"

"You are making my head hurt," Javert complained.

"My argument is sound. If I am a criminal in blood and bone, then arrest me. If I am not, that is because there is no predestined path, only what we choose by God's grace or our own unhappy ignorance. Which means a birth in sin is nothing – only our actions define us – and your acts define you as a man blinkered but unfailingly noble."

"Saint, confessor and now lawyer – is there no end to your talent?" he asked wretchedly.

"Javert..."

"Leave me be," he begged. Seeing Valjean set to argue further he cringed away from the coming words, beyond all ability, all sanity, to endure further. He would have far rather a knife; a cut to the throat would have been kinder and swifter by far.

"What is it you want?" Valjean demanded and for the first time his tone was more troubled than tranquil. "I sit here and look at you – it's worse than seeing a man with a broken leg – that at least can be splinted – you have a broken soul!"

The Inspector could not countenance such a question; he had done his best which was better than most men, but honour carried him only so far when faced with the convict's line of interrogation. What did he want? He thought again of the Seine - that terrible, cold and eternal rest - with the vague longing of a weary soldier contemplating his own grave. He had no assurances that death held the peace he had never found in life, but he did not believe it could be any worse than what he had suffered that night. Javert, all his life so certain and unswayable in his course, had reached the end of his not un-formidable will and now beyond all things longed for an end to his struggle. In this we must think no less of him; courage is a coin few are rich in, and the Inspector had that night borrowed far beyond what you or I could muster.

Valjean filled the silence with further words, aware that his attempt at succor was like water pouring into a drain, but unable to do anything else. He offered up the first thing that came to mind, the most obvious placation. "If you must arrest me I have no qualms. I meant what I said – I have given myself to your keeping; you may take me to the Préfecture in the morning."

Javert's long limbs were drawn in, pushing his back further towards the wall and away from the man before him – it was, Valjean realized, like watching a cat arch its back or the heckles on a dog rise; part defense, part visceral refute of whatever had occurred.

I have commented before on how all men have animal parts within their character, and that if Javert's totem was any it was wolf; but that is not the whole of it. Most men are not aware of their bestial natures. They have the gluttony of a pig, the raucousness of a jay, the temerity of a fox and yet go through life unaware of the stamp of the creature upon their countenance. Javert was a man who knew all to well he had been born a wolf. He had seen when still a cub what happened to wolves: they grew, they plundered, they were hated and they were shot down. So he had forged for his nature an unbreakable collar – an iron noose called 'Law'. And he forbade himself to give in to any passing wildness of his blood and subsumed himself in the role he had made: that of society's guard dog. On the hunt, when the moon was high and his prey run to ground, his mouth would fix and his chin rise into a lupine expression of savage delight, because however adamantine one's control, the beast cannot be erased. (He had – although it was one of the few facts unknown to him – been named amongst the lowest fraternity of Paris' underclass as _Le Loup Garou_ – a sobriquet which would likely entertain and dismay the good Inspector in equal measure.)

"Cease this!" Javert hissed. "Or if it is mockery and I hope to god it is, choose some other avenue to undermine."

"Do not doubt my sincerity on this matter, I beg you..."

"I cannot stand your sincerity!" The force he gave to the words caused him to cough.

Valjean was silenced, both by the anguish he had engendered and the fit following it.

"I will not arrest you," Javert said when he had the breath for it. "I _cannot_ arrest you – have I not made myself clear?"

"Forgive me," he said politely, an extra polish to his tone lending an air of formality and therefore distance. A small tentative smile. "Speaking with you is like moving through uncharted waters. I unfurl the sails and then scupper the hull on reefs I cannot see."

"You should keelhaul your navigator," the Inspector commented at length, tantamount in the circumstance to _'apology accepted'_.

The fire still burnt, the logs hissing as they were consumed; Valjean looked to it, mindful of the need to move, to do some petty task in an attempt the sweep the awkwardness away. There was however no task in need of his hands, so he sat, idle and uncomfortable. For the first time, the two men found themselves ill at ease in the other's presence.

Uncharacteristically, it was the Inspector who spoke first. "Why were you there?"

"Where?" It was a response without thought, he was so relieved at the asking.

Javert's voice lacked its usual acerbity at having to clarify his words, a lack telling in itself. "At the Pont au Change. Why not embracing your daughter, changing your shirt, drinking brandy - whatever it is you sought to do."

Valjean's brief thankfulness at a release from the tension that had suffused them both faded, his expression falling to something stiller by far. He looked at nothing for a time trying to order his words. "I saw from the window you were gone I… I had a foreboding." He shied from abandoning his account, although in that phrase he had exposed the heart of it. "I had set my course – accepted what must be done... and you were gone." He had not the words to tell how lost he had felt in that moment.

For a second Javert looked almost appalled and then he laughed, a rictus death's skull whisper of hilarity. "Valjean, the iconoclast who lives by his own rules was disquieted by uncertainty - oh that is too rich! At the moment when I regained my equilibrium, you lost yours."

_Two sides to a coin_, he thought, but did not say it. "I have no explanation," he rejoined instead, "none that would satisfy you. I - I had a feeling of dread, and the only way I could quiet it was to follow."

Javert's evil humor vanished, sunk into a silence profound as a church at the knowledge that out of all the people he had ever encountered, this man, this convict, had read his motives somehow without knowing, and followed, seeking to save a life he felt but did not yet know would be lost. It was an understanding of one man by another that came as close to the divine, the supernatural as the Inspector had ever known. It would have surprised and terrified him, if he had space for further revelations of the kind in his soul. Perhaps it was a mercy that the night had carried him far beyond such things. There had never been room in the Inspector's life for acts of God, and yet what else could it be? Looking from a casement above the street and noting the lack of a silhouette - a hunting shadow that had dogged him all his days - this man somehow correctly understood what such lack meant; not only understood but refuted it. This man was unique, insane, galling.

"Damn your perception," Javert muttered without conviction. "Damn your mercy and your humanity."

"I..." he stopped, stricken, having no words. "I'm sorry."

"Are you?"

"No," Valjean admitted, recanting his lie and so proving the Inspector's prophecy false.

Lids lowered to half mast over lead-grey eyes and Javert nodded. In that tired action was true acceptance at last of the strange camaraderie between them he had previously denied.

"Javert..." He paused, unsure suddenly out of all the impertinent questions he had asked that night if this was a familiarity too far. "Do you have a Christian name?"

The unhappy presence amidst the blankets shivered. "Yes." For a second it seemed he would leave it there, but he swallowed with discomfort and continued, "The same as my father's. I have never used it."

"How very like you."

"Who else should I be like?"

"No one."

If the Inspector had reply to make it was lost in tussication, the force of it causing him to curl in on himself as if such a position could calm his lungs.

Without thought to what he did Valjean reached out a hand and swept back the iron-grey tangles of hair that fell before the other man's face, smoothing them out of the way.

Javert's eyes were closed, his body tense as he struggled to master his breathing so it was impossible to tell whether he was cognisant of the action let alone his opinion upon it. "Is that the answer?" he said distractedly.

Valjean looked at the Inspector; he had started to shiver in earnest and although the corpse-ish mien still held he was either indifferent or unconscious to his body's distress. With a frown Valjean levered himself to his feet and busied himself at the grate, feeding the fire there until it blazed again. He glanced over his shoulder. "The answer to what?"

"24601... You rescued a man from the wreckage of a cart, you became father to an orphan child... You saved lives at the barricade and refused to take the life that was rightfully yours – my life. You rescued a boy, carried him through the depths of hell to the safety of his family... Prepared to make your farewells without complaint and deliver yourself into the hands of your enemy. Was it all for God's grace?"

Valjean's furrowed brow settled into a scowl. He was happy to engage in the sparing of opposing values, but the other man neither looked nor sounded well: the Inspector's gaze had traveled from flat to glassy, and his ashen skin was glazed with the blush of fever. He returned to the bedside. "Javert..."

"Is that it?" he demanded in a wretched and rambling mumble. "Why you defy everything? Defy authority and reason, form and sense? Because of the hand of God?"

Valjean detected both scorn and hope in the question.

"You break expectations with the ease of a patriarch breaking bread, never caring where those crumbs might scatter or what poor rat they may amaze..."

"Javert..." He wondered if he even knew what he was saying any more. He reached out and clasped one of the Inspector's hands – ice cold – and then laid his palm upon the man's forehead – coal hot. The Inspector seemed insensible of the first touch and flinched back from the second.

Valjean swore quietly to himself. He – the elder of them both - was tired: weary, ready to drop, t'was true from the trials he had suffered that night. He was chilled, his bones ached and when he did not marshal them to attention his eyes unfocused, seeking sleep. But his world had not been destroyed, and he had not attempted his own destruction in turn. Dimly (mercifully dimly) he remembered what it was to be soul- reaved, to have one's world turned upside-down by the awful, blinding, glorious and all-encompassing knowledge of God's sublime love. That, and when he jumped into the Seine _he_ had not done his best to swallow it.

_Putain._

He went to the washstand and poured out a measure of water into the bowl, claimed a pressed handkerchief from the wardrobe and returned to the bedside and the fever-ridden man who lay there. It had been a long night, but it seemed there would still be many hours to suffer before dawn.

He dampened the kerchief and placed it upon Javert's forehead; the Inspector shied away as if burnt. Valjean held him pinned. "Easy, easy now, be still."

A shudder and he yielded. His eyes rolled and then seemed to gain a little clarity. "I don't recall Dante's verse on this," he rasped reproachfully. "And his account seemed so thorough..."

"_Peace."_

His teeth barred in that curiously lupine grin of his and he began to laugh: silent awful mirth that wracked his body and made him gasp for breath before becoming a cough that stole what little air he'd gained.

"Peace," Valjean repeated softly, not a command this time but a plea.

Javert fretted, discomforted by sickness, tormented by recent happenstance; and, like any wolf in a trap, one part of him sought creature-comfort and a release from his pain, whilst at the same time every other fibre of his being snapped and snarled at all who approached, unable to recognise friend from foe and too morose to care either way.

For some time Valjean kept his left hand pressed against the Inspector's shoulder, the heel of his palm almost against his heart, feeling the pulse that rattled there and leaning his weight upon it when the Inspector struggled to rise.

"Let me up," he demanded, struggling. "Let me be!" his words slurred with the beginnings of delirium. The older man remained both silent and implacable, and for Javert's efforts a faun might have tried to escape the laze and might of a lion's paw. For now his strength had deserted him, burnt up by the heat of his skin and the chill in his bones; both fight and vitality dimmed.


	7. Chapter 7

**Note:**

Hello, sorry to interrupt.

I wrote this story first one way, then (as a semi delirious challenge to myself) another. I then failed to decide which I preferred.

So, the choice is yours.

If you would like this to turn a little slashy, read on as usual.

If you would rather it remains platonic, please SKIP the next chapter, go straight to Chapter 9 and read on.

Either way, I hope you enjoy it.

Wraithwitch

x


	8. Chapter 8

Valjean dipped the kerchief again in the washbowl, and lay the rag upon the man's forehead or ran it briskly across the sharp planes of his face. It worried him when Javert ceased to fight, sliding into a resentful stillness save for the shivers that still beset him. Three more times the kerchief was dipped into the water and lain upon the Inspector's brow, each time he did no more than shudder, some small sound of complaint escaping him. The fourth time, as Valjean refolded the cloth in his palm and laid it against Javert's skin, the unthinkable occurred: Javert made an inarticulate sound of need, such as a dog or a child might make, and leant towards the compress and the shelter of Valjean's hand.

Valjean said nothing, not wishing to endanger the fragile accord which had sprung through the bonds of compassion. At last when the cloth had warmed he moved to refresh it; the Inspector tilted his head towards the retreating touch with a fractious sigh – and, as if he had in that moment become aware of the weakness he displayed, his eyes snapped open, glazed and wide like clouded quartz to stare at Valjean.

The other man's mouth opened to offer reassurance, until it occurred to him how futile such an act would be. Any reassurance would be taken as a confirmation of guilt – it was how the Inspector's mind worked. Could Valjean say 'I saw nothing I consider weakness' without admitting it was only a differing opinion that excused the flaw? Could he say 'It is not a sin to seek comfort' without the phrase sounding damning by suggestion? He faltered, and it suddenly occurred to him to ask a very fundamental question that had hitherto never made it into his thoughts: _'What am I to you?'_ But now it had and he could not deny it. He remembered to close his mouth, but he continued to stare down at the Inspector, dark eyes flickering across his face as if it was a map he could read and accurately chart.

Javert's eyes shifted uncomfortably sideways and subjected the other man to the narrowest and most mistrustful of looks.

There are times, when we have not the guile or skill to hide our thoughts from our countenance; our modesty betrays us. The boy cannot lie to his mother, nor the belle to her lover without some awkward cast, some blush giving them away. The body has its own language, one which artists strive to capture and actors to utilise; a system that may convey a host of complex ideas in a single struck attitude.

In that moment, Valjean found he understood the look in Javert's smoke-grey eyes and the tilt of his chin as clearly as if he had spoken the words. It was a diatribe which began in refusal (refusal of his own weakness, his own heart, his own need – three things he considered one and the same) and swiftly boiled to anger all at the needless defence of his pride.

Valjean bore it, although without his usual ease. He wished to speak, to find words of calm and explanation but all eloquence danced away from him as autumn leaves from a tree; and whilst he was always in favour of plain-speaking, now was not the time for clumsy rhetoric.

For his part Javet seemed to find the other man's silence a spur to his back: his thin fingers clawed into his palms. "I want none of your damned pity!"

He had thought to say _'you do not have it'_ but that was not the first string of words that left his tongue. "What do you want of me?" he asked.

Lips bared against teeth as if meeting an insult. "Nothing!" he spat, pushing himself up in his fury. "I want nothing of you! I have _never_ wanted..." his words choked because for the first time in his life he was lying. "Never wanted anything of you..."

Their skulls were scarce a foot apart as these sentiments were voiced, and Valjean had ample opportunity to study the face that framed them. The rigid jaw, the pale and seared flesh, the twist of the lips that denoted hatred and conviction of the utmost calibre... And the cold emptiness of the eyes which shared no connection with the expression set around them, but far within their silvered depths were trying to douse a curious mix of hope and fear.

For the second time in as many hours, Valjean felt he had reached a wholly unexpected epiphany.

Something of the revelation was apparent, for the Inspector's muscles knotted further, trying to recoil but lacking the space. Without room to manoeuvre he returned to defence of an emotional nature. He allowed disdain and all the viciousness of shattered superiority to armour him, his aspect at once becoming wickedly brutal. "Saint Jean believes he knows all! You know _nothing!"_ A feral, empty grin that sank from sarcasm to sourness as soon as it arrived. "Do you think to save me, Valjean?" A grating noise between a laugh and a cough. "You arrogant bastard!" He thrust his face forward, barely a half-span apart from the other man. In an instant all passion and animation left him. In a terrible, sepulchral voice he spoke: "You. Cannot. Save. Me."

Those were the words that had been spoken with all the finality of Gideon's horn at the walls of Jericho. But they were not the words Valjean heard. He heard a far simpler message: _'Save me'._ Without hesitation Valjean leant forward, one hand reaching to tangle in the iron grey lengths of hair that curtained Javert's neck, the other hand balancing his weight as he pressed their mouths together, his teeth grazing the Inspector's lower lip, his tongue flicking against skin in a calculated show of intent before redrawing once more.

The other man had gone still as the grave, and were it not for his heart hammering in his chest he might well have been a corpse. He shivered, body caught between fever that chills and a differing kind that burns. "You cannot save me," Javert repeated, although this time it was a whisper, hopeful, hopeless, hollow and terrified.

"Can I not?" Valjean asked with quiet thoughtfulness.

"I have already fallen," he uttered like a ghost given leave to speak, his eyes never straying from Valjean's for an instant.

Slowly but with great purpose, Valjean moved, one limb at a time, with the precision of a dancer and the inevitability of the tide, until he straddled the Inspector's legs and leant close, one hand placed to either side of the blankets that swaddled him. In all this time, his gaze had been locked to the other man's, watching for any signal that he should cease. Hope and terror held, but no new sign was given. Gently he rocked forward until his face was once more before Javert's.

The Inspector's breath hitched shallowly in his chest.

"You have fallen," Valjean agreed lightly, his lips scarcely a finger-breadth away. "But do you not see?"

The Inspector ceased to breathe and his heart hammered all the louder for it.

"I am here," he voiced against the other man's lips, "to catch you."

There was a suspended moment, an instance that hangs like a deserted signpost, like a point on a wayfarer's map that shows many paths, one of which must be chosen and none of which may be returned from. (It is true, in this world God gives us many second chances, but, alas, once open some doors cannot be relocked, once left some idylls are forever lost.) It has been made clear, I hope, that the Inspector was a very thorough and intelligent man. He was not a genius given to leaps of insight, but whilst his reading of any situation might have been pedestrian, it was always astute. In this way, he did not miss the significance of that isolated instant; and he made his choice.

All at once the Inspector moved with the desperate decisiveness of one executing a sabre thrust: his mouth locked upon Valjean's with the hunger of a beggar at a feast. His eyes closed but his lips parted to devour the warmth awaiting them.

They spoke no more, for their mouths were attentive to other things, whilst around them was the rustle of blankets, the susurration of calloused fingers across skin, the hiss and crack as wood burnt to ember and the quieting of a city which had at last found some measure of peace. The parish bell tolled; neither of them noticed.

You might here question such a happenstance as it appears an unlikely thing to set down within my account. I beg you, quibble not. It is beyond my power truly to explain the complexity of human relations; wiser men than I have tried and their words offer crumbs of truth and satisfaction yet fail to cover the whole. Muse on this instead: the law of God is love above all, and to that end the Almighty gifted us with souls wiser than our reason.

Two spirits locked in adversity must come to know each other, to respect and understand each other whether the individuals acknowledge such or not. Hence, the prey respected the hunter - first begrudgingly, then freely. And the hunter became first intrigued, and then obsessed with his prey. Neither individual knew the truth clearly seen by their souls: that they had become tethered, and that for all the paths of the labyrinth they ran, they would only ever draw closer and tighter together.

Here and now was where the thread pulled taut, and two individuals were shown the truth their souls had been cognisant of for ever. They were not whole one without the other, and any entwinement of their bodies was only a pale reflection of the twined joining of their souls.

"Valjean..." the word scarcely had enough breath to carry it and the throat that voiced it was raw, the first syllable hardly there at all.

No answer was given, but dark eyes rose to look with diamond bright and rapt attention upon grey.

A word was uttered, taut, frantic, broken: and had we not known the Inspector to be a man of authority and nerve, we might have believed that word to be, _'Please'._

Valjean held still for a moment to gaze upon this lithe-muscled, austere and unknowable person who had never surrendered even a fragment of his being to another, never allowed himself to be shared with cordiality let alone intimacy, but remained ever apart, ever alone, and ever lonely. To hold oneself separate from all of humanity as if locked in a fort; what bravery must it take to unlock the gates at last? To unbar the doors not only to another but one long considered an enemy? Most men he had known in his life would not have the fortitude; their courage would break. He knew however, there was one final weakness to be revealed: the wolf must not just stand at the altar but bare his throat upon it if he was to learn that some sacrifices were not as terrible as they appeared, whilst the rewards bestowed could be great. His countenance showed wisdom, his voice love, as he said, "Fall."

"Oh – god," was the reply, ragged and splintered, caught between fear and want.

"Fall," he commanded softly.

"I-I..."

He moved with calm unhurried purpose to catch thin lips with his own, to bruise and taste. _"Fall."_ To possess and in turn surrender to in perfect trust.

There was a sound at the back of Javert's throat, the genesis of a word that was never quite born, but if it had, it would have been: _'Yes.'_ For the Inspector, that moment was like jumping into the Seine all over again: vertigo, a loss of equilibrium which could never be regained followed by a rush, a plummet that ended in sensation deep enough to drown.

He had fallen; but the death that claimed him this time was so, so sweet.


	9. Chapter 9

Eyelids flickered and eyes strained reluctantly towards the _argent-or_ sunlight that blessed the room. The fire had died to ash and ember; a small copper kettle and a teapot sat before the hearth. A washbowl was by the bed, a rag resting upon the lip of the pottery. Further objects marred the floor: a huddle of filthy clothes in one corner, a greatcoat and boots rested towards the door, a spoilt shirt lay between a suit of dark breeches and waistcoat. A cane-seated chair was placed at an angle between hearth and bed; in this, sprawled in profound slumber, was a broad shouldered gentleman with startlingly silver-white hair.

Javert's eyes saw all this; he lay still, as if awaiting his thoughts to order themselves and make sense of the view. He blinked and then slowly, cautiously, levered himself upright amidst the rumpled blankets.

He felt unpleasantly light-headed, but at long last his mind had a crystalline clarity of the sort that denotes utter certainty, complete conviction. With the fervour of a sailor clasping a spar in a tempest, Javert embraced it and the actions it bid him take.

His hand stirred to draw back the counterpane; his fingers shook. He gave them a look of reproof, as if the fever that still resided in his limbs was an insult not to be countenanced. To prove this he swung his legs over the edge of the bed and made himself stand – faltered for a moment, and then worked a little more steel into his backbone.

Carefully, quietly, he retrieved his breeches and forced the clammy wool over his legs. Stockings followed, not pulled straight but left bunched sadly about his heels. The waistcoat was glared at and abandoned, the shirt ignored in favour of the borrowed one he already wore. Boots were slipped on with uncertain fingers and the greatcoat reclaimed, its cold weight draped around his shoulders. With a final and inscrutable look at the room and its unconscious occupant, Javert left.

* * *

It was not yet seven of the clock.

In the hall of M. Fauchelevent's meagre townhouse at Rue de l'Homme Arme, Toussaint was carrying a breakfast tray up to the young lady of that residence when she beheld by the front door a figure dressed in black, narrow of shoulder and haggard of countenance. "Oh!" she gasped, nearly dropping the tray in her fright. "M-monsieur?" she stammered. For a moment he had seemed to be someone she recognised, a member of the Paris constabulary, but surely such a straggle-haired creature could not belong to the city authorities?

The flint-eyed wight before her looked grave. "Madame," he replied courteously, lifting a hand to tip his hat before realising his head was bare. His lips twisted into a smile, such as a broke-winged crow might have if it could smile, and he turned upon his heel and quit the house.

Caught in the mire of her shock, Toussaint did nothing but stand there and tremble. Of a sudden, a mix of fear and borrowed courage prompted her to action and she hurried upstairs to check on the rest of the household so she might discover what calamity the ill-omened man had visited upon them or, if he was a herald, prepare for what calamity was to come.

* * *

Early in the morning of June 7th (what would have been termed Année 40 de la République, mois de Prairal, decade II, jour du Nonidi by the Revolutionary Calendar), the wraith of a man stalked the deadened Paris streets.

The troubles of the night had been brutally suppressed by the National Guard, and all citizens of sense stayed huddled in their beds; only the brave and the few ventured out, seeking news with the daring of errant knights stealing gold from a serpent's horde. They scurried upon their errands like mice, furtive looks and worried eyes keeping watch for the cat's paw.

The man walked in no such manner; his stride was a little shorter than its customary length, his steps a little less striking, but he was straight-shouldered and gazed at the city with an indifference the common observer might mistake for arrogance. In this way he walked from the parish of Notre-Dame-des-Blancs-Manteaux and down the Rue du Temple towards Rue Saint Martin and Quai de Gesvres. He crossed the Pont Notre Dame to the Ile de le Citié and the Préfecture de Police: that building that basks in the twin shadows of the Palais de Justice and the Cathédrale Notre Dame. There he entered, and was for some time lost to our sight.

At length he left the Préfecture and proceeded with dogged step to the Pont au Change.

His pace slowed. At the apex of the bridge he stopped.

His back bowed; he rested his elbows upon the stone balustrade and gazed with strange intensity at the marl-grey rush of the river as it flowed below, swirling westward between the feet of the arches.

All at once he turned and gazed to his right, stooped, and picked up some small object which lay discarded against the masonry. It glinted in his unsteady grasp; a narrow chased silver snuff box the likes of which any city gentleman might carry in his pocket. He regarded it blankly as if waiting for it to do something. Accepting at last its refusal to become animate, and with an expression for the world we might interpret as _'so, this is how it stands, is it?'_ he leaned once more against the parapet.

With deliberation, he slowly tilted his palm. The silver trinket clung to his hand for an instant before toppling side over side and end over end into the waiting maw of the Seine. It caught the light as it spun, a bright and final flash of farewell which danced across the stone faces of the Palais de Justice, the Cathédrale Notre Dame and the man in turn.

He watched it fall.

* * *

Inspector Javert (First Class) of the Police, was seen no more by the citizens of Paris.

* * *

Two weeks after the civil unrest of June 6th and nine days after an amnesty had been declared for the insurgents, M. Fauchelevent - who we perhaps should call by his true name: Jean Valjean - received a letter. Toussaint brought it to him as he sat at the desk of his room, setting his monthly accounts to order. It came on sturdy paper and was sealed modestly with pine-green wax as if it knew it had miles to travel and wished to complete the journey without being a bother to anyone. It was addressed curiously, holding no name, but only a title: _To Monsieur of the __Rue de l'Homme Arme, No. 7._

The contents was no less curious or brusque in its wording, beginning without preamble or correct address and containing in its penmanship a certain sardonic air:

_Forgive my abrupt departure, I feared more of your charity may kill me._

_I leave you to your life and that most aggravating grace which shelters you._

_There is a small town east of Orléans that manufactures flax: Saint-Jean-de-Braye._

_It is shortly to have a new keeper of the peace._

_Should you or your family find yourselves in the Saint Loup district, ask for directions to old Archard Javert's place. He died near a decade back and his son came to a bad end years ago in the galleys, but the house still retains his name. Town gossip has it that his grandson has recently taken possession of the property._

_They say he is a forbidding fellow, but on the few occasions he has company, he sets a good table._

_I dislike unpaid debts. I still have your shirt._

_J_

_

* * *

_

((All done. This story was supposed to be something easy, scrawled whilst I had pneumonia. What with the random points of research (did they have underwear in 1830? what is the date in the Revolutionary calendar? which way is downstream in Paris? etc), re-reading swathes of Les Miserables, rewriting bits of story because ideas I'd been given and used in good faith made me an unintentional plagiarist, and to top it off, never being able to decide between slash or not... it all turned into some grueling form of penance. Although penance for what I don't know =P If this story disappears from the archive it's because I've burnt the damn thing. Anyway. Thank you for reading it.))


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